Grammatical and Lexical Errors in Low-Proficiency Thai Graduate Students’ Writing

Abstract

English grammar and lexis seem to be among the most problematic areas in second language (L2) acquisition (Brown, 2014). A good number of past studies have investigated English learners’ different kinds of errors, using a variety of elicitation techniques, such as a translation task, a grammaticality judgment task, a role play, an essay, etc. (Abbasi and Karimnia, 2011; Hemchua and Schmitt, 2006; Sattayatham and Honsa, 2007; Ting, Mahadhir, and Chang, 2012; Yamashita and Jiang, 2010). The data drawn from such instruments, however, are sometimes criticized for not reflecting learners’ genuine L2 competence since these tasks can differ from those they perform in everyday life (Larsen-Feeman and Long, 1991). In other words, it is believed that learners’ true competence may be observed through a task that elicits more natural L2 use, e.g. free writing with some controlled topics (Phoocharoensil, 2009). The current study was therefore undertaken to bridge this gap by exploring low-proficiency Thai EFL students’ writing, with an emphasis on their grammatical and lexical errors, using a paragraph as the main data collection technique.