A Study to Analyze Errors of Writing English of EFL Students at Kasetsart University Chalermprakiat Sakon Nakhon Province Campus, Thailand
Kasetsart University, Thailand
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study was to investigate the errors of writing English of first year students majoring in English in the issues of grammatical structure, vocabulary and idioms, spelling, and punctuation marks. The research instruments were four multiple-choice English achievement tests that were designed to measure the students’ English writing ability in punctuation mark usage, word, sentence and paragraph writing. The tests were designed and administered to freshmen who are majoring in English. The samples were consisting of 40 Thai students, randomly selected from one English major class, studying at Faculty of Liberal Arts and Management Science, Kasetsart University Chalermprakiat Sakon Nakhon Province Campus. The collected data were analyzed and interpreted statistically by the percentage. The results of study revealed that in the areas of grammatical structure, the errors found at high level were related to the categories of nouns, gerunds and infinitive, passive and active, direct and indirect, tenses, relative pronouns, question tags, prepositions, agreement of subjects and verbs, with the percentage of 85.33, 82.22, 82.22, 75.33,72.44, 65.88,65.88,63.33 and 55.22 respectively. The errors found at moderate level were related to pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions with the percentage of 44.33, 41.33, 38.22, and 38.22 respectively. The errors found at low level were related to articles with the percentage of 19.55.In relation to vocabulary and idioms, the errors were at high level in terms of meaning, and were at high level in terms of usage, the percentage of errors of the two aspects being 55.33 and 51.77 respectively. And the spelling mistakes were at moderate level with the percentage of 34.22. Finally, the errors of using punctuations were at moderate level with the percentage of 35.22.
KEYWORDS
making errors, writing skills, grammatical structure, English writing teaching and learning