AN ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH WRITING ERRORS OF STUDENTS AT RAJAMANGALA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLONGY TAWAN – OK

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to analyze students’ grammatical errors in English writing in order to develop their English writing skills. A sample of 35 sophomore English for International Communication-majored students enrolled in a “Professional English 2” course of academic year 2020, was purposively selected in this study. The research instruments consisted of a paragraph writing assignment of at least 400 words and a form for recording 8 categories of grammatical errors in English writing accompanied by post-writing in-depth Interviews to identify the causes of errors. The results based on the grammatical error analysis indicated errors including 1) run - on sentences (59.5%), 2) sentence fragment (44.45%), 3) faulty pronoun reference (18.55%), 4) faulty parallelism (12.6%), 5) word choice (12.6%), 6) misplaced modifiers (3.5%), 7) subject-verb agreement (2.8%), and 8) adjective and adverb (2.45%). Errors committed in English writing were mainly caused by L1 interference and limited knowledge of English grammar. From this study, researcher designed writing grammatical exercise focusing on 8 categories of grammatical errors in English writing during the class in order to reinforce students’ writing skills.