Common Grammatical Errors in Academic Writing: How are They Treated by NNE Raters?
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Abstract
This research aimed to investigate common errors produced by Thai EFL learners in their academic writing and to investigate non-native English raters’ perceptions of the common errors. There were two phases: 1) error analysis and 2) raters’ perceptions survey. The samples for the error analysis were 49 written responses from a university entrance examination. The errors were first identified by using Grammarly, and they were coded following the Error Code adapted from Ampornratana (2009), Bootchuy (2008), and Phetdannuea (2016). The research results were found as follows:
1. The results revealed 24 error categories with 97 error types. The 42 sentences that contained the 14 error types that were produced more than 30 times in the samples were used in the questionnaire. The experienced raters rated the sentences in the questionnaire with scores from 1 (i.e., most serious) to 3 (i.e., no error).
2. The results of the raters’ perceptions revealed that the errors concerning articles could be mostly overlooked by experienced raters. Interestingly, none of the 14 common errors was rated “1” more than fifty percent. In other words, although the experienced raters saw the errors, they didn’t see them as serious features of academic writing.
The findings also suggested potential issues for future studies to investigate the application of this phenomenon in pedagogy and assessment.
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