The purpose of this study is to look carefully at the progress of grammatical learning of English among students in one of state universities in Malang, Indonesia. More specifically, this study is intended to explore the typical grammatical errors made by the freshmen during writing in the context of EFL. The study is set out to conduct a corpus exploitation with the learning corpora itself. We use CBLING (Corpus of Bilingual Learners’ Languages) to examine the grammatical errors typically appear around the production of tense markers. In this case, the learning corpora containing 200.000 word-tokens around 26 English paragraphs of cause and effect. The findings of this study are not only to inform English teacher about the common grammatical errors, but also to inform them to pay attention to the learners’ writing development and they can design the relevant pedagogical interventions.

Keywords: Grammatical error, CBLING, learner corpora