COMPARATIVE ERROR ANALYSIS OF L2 WRITING ACROSS DIFFERENT ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES: ARTS VS. SCIENCE STUDENTS IN PAKISTANI UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

This research paper examines disciplinary variation in L2 writing errors by looking at Pakistani students at the university by comparing cohorts of Arts and Science scribes. Data were obtained via a comparative error analysis design on 100 randomly selected undergraduate students (50 from Arts and 50 from Science) who were made to complete a set of controlled essay tasks based on specific topics. Manual identification of errors was divided into 16 types on the grammatical and structural errors following the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) framework, and these errors were tagged by using a hybrid method consisting of both GPT-03 Mini automated tagging and researcher verification. The quantitative analysis corrected the number of errors per student and the qualitative one discussed the nature of an error, its potential causes, and its setting among disciplines. Findings indicated that the two groups had four categories of errors that occurred at high frequency: Noun, Form, Punctuation, and Article thus indicating common systemic difficulties probably that can be attributed to L1 interference and deficient in basic knowledge on grammatical rules. But there were disciplinary variations: Articles, Nouns and Auxiliary Verbs errors were much more prevalent among Science students, and Form and Punctuation errors were a touch more common among Arts students, consistent with scientific and humanities styles of writing. These results suggest the necessity to introduce English as Academic Purposes (EAP) interventions that interacts with core grammar support and discipline training since the particulars of rhetorical and structural directives of academic writing in the field of arts and science in Pakistan in higher education context require addressing.