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VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES &


INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION

------------------------------

BÙ I THỊ TRÂM

COMMON WRITTEN ERRORS COMMITTED BY FIRST YEAR


STUDENTS AT THE FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE
TEACHER EDUCATION, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE


REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS (TEFL)

SUPERVISOR: NGUYEN TUAN ANH, M.A

Hanoi, May, 2010

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ACCEPTANCE

I hereby state that I: Bui Thi Tram, class 061E4, being a candidate
for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (TEFL) accept the requirement of the
College relating to the retention and use of Bachelor’s Graduation paper
deposited in the library.
In term of these conditions, I agree that the origin of my paper
deposited in the library should be accessible for the purpose of study and
research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the
librarian for the care, loan or reproduction of the paper.

Signature
Bui Thi Tram

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First and foremost, I would like to give my sincere thanks and


profound gratefulness to my supervisor, Mr. Nguyen Tuan Anh, M.A for
his enthusiastic support as well as his invaluable guidance, which assumed
determining factors in the completion of my research paper. Besides, the
birth of this research paper derives greatly from the constant supporting and
continual encouragement from my family and my friends. I would also be
grateful to the teachers of Division 1 for their unconditional co-operation in
my questionnaire survey.

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ABSTRACT

Exploring and detecting errors produced by EFL (English as a


Foreign Language) learners attract scholar's concern greatly. However,
errors produced by learners from different geographical territories and
areas are by no means the same. Therefore, the researcher would like to
conduct a study on "Common written errors committed by first year
students at FELTE, ULIS, VNU Hanoi" to explore further into the most
frequently encountered types of written errors made by freshmen and the
very causes to these. In this study, 231 students' writing samples as well as
10 teachers in charge of teaching writing skills to first year students were
involved in the study. The results gained from the analysis of students'
writing samples and teachers' questionnaire have revealed six common
errors made by first year students and five actual causes to these categories
of errors. Suggested techniques on how to deal with students' errors are also
included to earn the study practical implications.

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LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Figure 1: Error Vs Mistakes.................................................................................. 9


Figure 2: Stages of learning past simple of a child............................................. 11
Figure 3: Different paragraph pattern in different languages ............................. 12
Table 1: Samples collected from each kind of test ............................................. 41
Table 2.1: Written errors of first year students at ED, HULIS as
synthesized from document analysis................................................................... 42
Table 2.2: Written errors of first year students at ED, HULIS as
synthesized from teachers' questionnaire............................................................ 43
Figure 4: Written errors of first year students at ED, HULIS…………….44
Table 3: Components of grammar errors ............................................................ 45
Figure 5: Components of grammar errors........................................................... 46
Table 4: Typical examples of common grammar errors..................................... 47
Table 6: Typical example of expression errors................................................... 48
Table 7: Written errors belonging to general items ............................................ 49
Figure 7: Written errors belonging to general items........................................... 50
Table 8: Examples of expression errors.............................................................. 51
Table 9: Common written errors related to syntax ............................................. 52
Table 10: Typical examples of common syntax errors....................................... 53
Table 11: Components of mechanics errors........................................................ 54
Figure 9: Components of mechanics Errors........................................................ 55
Table 12: Examples of common mechanics errors ............................................. 56
Table 13: Typical examples of lexical Items ...................................................... 57
Table 14: Common written Errors of first year main-stream students at
English Department, HULIS............................................................................... 58

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Table 15: Teachers' rating the significance of causes to students' common
written errors ....................................................................................................... 58
Table 16: The popularity of each kind of causes to students' common
written errors ....................................................................................................... 60
Figure 10: The popularity of each kind of causes to students' common
written errors ....................................................................................................... 61
Figure 11: Pair work and group work in peer correction.................................... 66
Figure 12: Error Maze......................................................................................... 67
Table 17: Collocation practice table ................................................................... 68

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements……………………..………………………………….i
Abstract…………………………………...……...………………………...ii
List of figures and tables…………………………...……………………...iii

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1. Problem statement and rationale for the study............................................... 1


1.2. Aims of the study ........................................................................................... 2
1.3. Significance of the study................................................................................ 3
1.4. Scope of the study .......................................................................................... 3
1.5. Organization of the study............................................................................... 3

Chapter 2 literature review

2.1. Written errors and related theoretical issues.................................................. 5


2.1.1. Definition of errors...................................................................................... 5
2.1.2. Mistakes Vs Errors...................................................................................... 6
2.1.3. The role of "errors" in English Language Teaching ................................... 9
2.1.4. Classification of written errors in English Language Teaching ............... 11
2.1.4.1. Inter-lingual errors ................................................................................. 12
2.1.4.2. Intra-lingual errors ................................................................................. 13
2.1.4.3. Developmental errors ............................................................................. 14
2.1.5. Causes of written errors in the field of English Language Teaching ....... 15
2.1.5.1. Mother tongue interference.................................................................... 15
2.1.5.2. Overgeneralization ................................................................................. 16
2.1.5.3. Ignorance of rule restrictions ................................................................. 17
2.1.5.4. Incomplete application of rules.............................................................. 18

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2.1.5.5. False concepts hypothesized .................................................................. 18
2.2. Error correction ............................................................................................ 19
2.2.1. Different views concerning written error correction ................................ 19
2.2.2. Teacher role in written error correction .................................................... 20
2.2.3. Techniques in error correction .................................................................. 21

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY
3.1. Participants................................................................................................... 23
3.2. Data collection instruments.......................................................................... 24
3.2.1. Document analysis .................................................................................... 25
3.2.2. Questionnaire ............................................................................................ 26
3.3. Data collection procedure ............................................................................ 27
3.4. Data analysis methods.................................................................................. 30
3.5. Data analysis procedures.............................................................................. 30

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION


4.1. Research question 1...................................................................................... 32
4. 2. Research question 2..................................................................................... 51

CHAPTER 5: RECOMMENDATIONS
5.1. Peer-correction ............................................................................................. 61
5.2. Teacher correction........................................................................................ 62

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION
6.1. Main findings ............................................................................................... 69
6.2. Limitations of the study ............................................................................... 70

References
Appendices

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1. Problem statement and rationale for the study

For most language educators, the very goal of language education


lies in the mastery of communicative competence which embodies not only
speaking skills but also writing skills, for writing is an indispensable means
to communicate with ones that are not present at the moment of speaking.
Thus, it is of no surprise that writing skill is claimed to encompass internal
speech (La Brant, 1946). Writing is even considered imperative as it has a
close link to speaking abilities (Sperling, 1996).
However, it is worth noting that writing in a second language is by
no means an easy task. A number of researches have shown that English as
a Foreign Language learners write differently from native English speakers
(Hinkel, 2002). Learners are to be adventurous enough with the target
language to produce their own pieces of writings. As a result of such a
risky undertaking, learners' deficiency in using the language would be
shown through the written errors committed. In the light of the process
approach to writing teaching and learning, learners' errors represent no
interference with the target language but a positive factor which facilitates
the learning process and a valuable indicator of learner strategies (Corder,
1967). Hence, learners' written errors should be taken into serious
consideration and paid adequate attention to.
At the Faculty of English Language Teacher Education (FELTE),
Hanoi University of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Viet
Nam National University, the teaching of writing skills has long been
considered vital; thus, it has been integrated into the syllabus along with the
other three skills namely speaking skills, listening skills and reading skills.
The four-year writing syllabus in the FELTE employs the ascending level
of proficiency introduced by the British Council ranging from Preliminary

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English Test (PET) to Certificate in Advanced English (CAE).
Accordingly, first year students at the faculty are expected to achieve the
level of PET proficiency in writing skills. Despite the fact that analyzing
those fresh men's written errors would contribute greatly to their learning
process, this area of research has been paid little attention to. Thus, the
researcher would like to conduct a study on "Common written errors
committed by first year students at the Faculty of English Language
Teacher Education (FELTE), University of Foreign Languages and
International Studies, Viet Nam National University-Hanoi " to have a
closer look into this field.

1.2. Aims of the study

First and foremost, this study is to investigate further into the types
of writing errors made by first year students, and basing on the findings
elicited from the research, suggestions as well as recommendations would
be proposed so that they can serve as practical implications for teachers
along with afterward studies. In general, the study is to address the two
following questions:
1. What are the common written errors committed by first year
students at the Faculty of English Language Teacher Education (FELTE),
Hanoi University of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Viet
Nam National University, Hanoi?

2. What are the causes to common written errors made by first year
students at the Faculty of English Language Teacher Education (FELTE),
Hanoi University of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Viet
Nam National University?

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1.3. Significance of the study

On conducting the research paper, the researcher is in a hope to


review the theoretical issues related to the research problem and present
practical findings in the research setting. Furthermore, this study is also
expected to offer a panorama on the research setting to serve later
researchers on conducting successive studies.

1.4. Scope of the study

As its title suggests, the study focuses on "Common written errors


conducted by first year students at the Faculty of English Language
Teacher Education, Hanoi University of Foreign Languages and
International Studies, Viet Nam National University". Nevertheless, the
researcher has no intention of including the fast-track class in the
investigation but the main stream students only. This is due to the fact that
students in the fast-track class are obliged to meet tougher requirements
than the mainstream freshmen. The involvement of the fast tract students
would result in a variance, which would affect the reliability of the study.

Besides, on account of the deadline for submission of this research


paper, the researcher cannot involve the investigation of freshmen's writing
samples expanding for the period of their first year. Instead, the researcher
would like to focus on error-detection of students' samples produced during
their first semester.

1.5. Organization of the study

The research paper consists of six chapters. Each chapter is set to


deal with a specific aim. Particularly, chapter 1 states the reason, the
significance as well as the scope of the study. Chapter 2 focuses on
reviewing and clarifying theoretical background related to the issue

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researched. Chapter 3 presents the setting of the study and how the
research is carried out. Chapter 4 is a justification and clarification of the
data gained from data collection. Accordingly, chapter 5 proposes the
researcher's recommendations on the research problem basing on her own
thoughts as well as her adaptation of relevant reference books. In the last
place, chapter 6 summarizes the main findings of the research and poses a
critical overview on the limitations of the research paper.

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CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1. Written errors and related theoretical issues

2.1.1. Definition of errors


Throughout the history of English Language Teaching, a number of
definitions of errors have been proposed by experts. Basically, these
definitions may share the same meaning; yet there is much to be considered
in terms of their differences.
Some scholars are in favor of defining errors basing on their degree
of frequency. Cunningworth (1987, p.87) sees errors as "systematic
deviation from the norms of the language being learned". This can be
interpreted as the repeated violation against the rules and the standards of
the language being learned, excluded from the language that has not been
learned. Nevertheless, the definition itself is problematic, for the concept
"learned" is just relative. Students may not learn the language in class but
they may have learned it somewhere outside the class. It is also probable
that students learned the language but they may have forgotten it. Thus, it
would be difficult for language teachers to decide whether students have or
have not learned the language.
On the other hand, other scholars identify the term "errors" with
regard to students' inability to correct these errors by themselves. Edge
(1997, p.18) defines "errors" in a simple way as followed "If a student
cannot self-correct a mistake in his or her own English, but the teacher
thinks that the class is familiar with the correct form, we shall call that sort
of mistake an error." Edge's definition has one trait in common with that of
Cunning; that is, certain parts of the language being learned are

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problematic to students. Thus, they make errors unconsciously, which
accounts for their incapacity to self-correct.
In the meantime, some experts combine both of the two dimensions
above when mentioning the notion of "errors". Corder (1967: 22) regards
"errors" as the "systematic and regular deviant form of language produced
by second language learners at competence level due to linguistic reason."
Accordingly, second language learners repeatedly produce deviant forms of
language because of their deficient competence of selective items of the
target language but not because of their carelessness or lack of attention,
etc.
In the light of the aforementioned definitions, the researcher would
like to employ the third view by Corder as it proves to be the most
comprehensive. According to Corder, an error is characterized with two
features namely systematic deviancy and learner's deficiency to self-
correct. These two features can be considered criteria to determine whether
students have conducted an error or not.

2.1.2. Mistakes Vs Errors


It is vital that a clear distinction between mistakes and errors be
presented as this is much concerned with error correction, or what to be
corrected in language teaching to be specific.
Basically, there exist two widespread trends of view related to the
differentiation between errors and mistakes. One states that mistakes are a
cover term for errors whilst the other claims the opposite.
Lee (1990), an advocate of the later perspective, sees "errors" from
two different points of view namely psycholinguistics/ or Native speaker
speech and Applied linguistics/ or English Language Teaching (ELT). As
for the former, the term "errors" refers "more to what is known as a
"mistake", or "a slip of the tongue" in spontaneous speech or writing,

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attributable to the malfunctioning of the brain." (Crystal in Lee 1990, p.18).
With a view of the later, the notion of errors appears to differ remarkably
from that in psycholinguistics. In the field of ELT, errors would be
characterized by the deviation in the norm of language due to second
language learner's competence whereas mistakes bear a more similar
meaning to the term "errors" used in psycholinguistics. Figure 1 below, as
proposed by Lee (1990) would offer an obvious graphic representation of
this:
Error
(Umbrella term)

Linguistics/Psycholinguistics Applied Linguistics/


Native speaker speech Second Learner Speech

Error belonging to Mistakes belonging


Mistakes belonging to competence to performance
performance

Characteristics: Characteristics: Characteristics:


- slips of the tongue - speaker - slips of the tongue
- lapses of memory knowledge of - lapses of memory
- speech condition from language in - speech condition from
physical/mental state question physical or mental state
- made by Native speaker - monitored/ - assumed to have
only corrected by speaker knowledge of
- speaker knowledge of others langue system
langue system - self-corrected/ self-
- can be self-corrected/ monitored?
self-monitored - monitored by others?
- rarely corrected by
others

Figure 1: Error Vs Mistakes

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Edge (1997) presents a contrasting view to Lee's. He does not put it
straightforward what a mistake is, yet the concept is gradually built up
during his presentation. He considers "mistakes" a broad term involving
mistakes of form and mistakes of meaning. The former contains three sub-
types which are slips, errors and attempts. In accordance with this
taxonomy, Edge (1997: 20) provides simple definitions of each type.
" If the teacher think that the student can self-correct a mistake,
we call that mistake a slip.
…If a student cannot self-correct a mistake in his or her own
English, but the teacher thinks that the class is familiar with the
correct form, we shall call that sort of mistake an error.
…When the teacher knows that the students have not yet learned
the language necessary to express what they want to say, we shall
call their mistakes attempts."
In general, Edge regards all the deviation that leads to
misunderstanding and that contradicts to standard rules of English as
"mistakes"; and "error" is a corresponding sub-type of mistakes. By the
same token, Rebat (2008, p.23) demonstrates a clear-cut borderline
between errors and mistakes: "mistakes are those parts of conversations and
compositions that are deviated from the selected norms of mature language
performance". A mistake is produced at either the competence level or at
the performance level. Technically, mistakes at competence level are
referred as errors and those at performance level are known as mistakes.
To sum up, no matter how varied these schools of thoughts are, they
are by nature the same in the sense that a mistake is caused by non-
linguistic reasons such as fatigue, lack of attention, carelessness, haste or
some other "physical defects" while an error is systematically caused by
linguistic reasons. Thus, it is the error that should be the focus of attention
in the field of language teaching rather than mistake.

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2.1.3. The role of "errors" in English Language Teaching

Generally speaking, views towards the role of "errors" in English


Language Teaching have shifted considerably within the past few decades.
Traditional views hold that errors are to be avoided at any expense and they
are negative manifestation of learner's performance. Audiolingualists
claims that a great effort should be made to prevent learner's errors.
Advocates of modern language teaching approaches like Communicative
Language Teaching, on the other hand, see error as an indispensable part of
the learning process which proves that real learning is taking place and that
error is an indication of learner's efforts in producing the language (Corder,
1967 and Brown, 1980). Corder (1967) also argues that errors are the most
important source of information revealing that learners are organizing
knowledge available to them to produce the language at a particular point
of time. Edge (1997) is also in line with this school of thought. He regards
errors as necessary learning steps which are evident for the fact that
students are learning the language successfully. By the same token,
Bartram, M & Walton, R (2001, p.11) see errors as "an
inescapable…natural part of language learning" and that they are "part of
the learning process: not the wrong turning on the road of mature language
use but actually part of the road itself." These two scholars consider the
process of learning a second language similar to that of a baby learning his
mother tongue. They illustrate their argument with an example of stages of
learning past simple of a child as shown in Figure 2. At stage 1, the child
is attempting to talk about a past action without any knowledge about the
past tense. At stage 2, he knows that verbs in past tense should carry "-ed"
but he overgeneralizes the rule and adds "-ed" to every verb to form its past
tense form. It is at this stage that an error occurs. However, this error is
one stage in the line of language development of the child, which proves

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that the child is learning the language. Thus, there is no point in over-
worrying about the error that he has conducted.
Daddy go work Daddy goed Daddy went
yesterday work yesterday work
yesterday

I don't know I know I know


anything something everything
about the about the about the
past simple past simple past simple

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3

Figure 2: Stages of learning past simple of a child

In particular, errors benefit both the learner and the teacher. As for
the former, errors could assume the role of stimuli to facilitate learning and
assist students with achieving writing fluency (Lyons and Heasley, 1992).
With respect to the later, errors serve as an invaluable implication of what
strategies used by learners and an indication of what they have learnt or
have not (Doff, 1989 and Crystal, 1980). In short, there has been a shift in
the view concerning the importance of errors in the field of English
Language Teaching from a negative to positive spectrum. It can be
concluded that errors are by no means to be avoided at any expense.

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2.1.4. Classification of written errors in English Language Teaching

Scholars have not reached a consensus concerning the categorization


of written errors in the field of English Language Teaching. Each expert
proposes a different criterion to classify written errors.

Burt and Kiparsky (1974: 74) suggest the two terms "global and local
errors" to indicate a hierarchy among categories of errors:

"Global errors are those that violate rules involving the overall
structure of a sentence, the relation among constituent clauses, or in a
simple sentence, the relation among major constituents. Local mistakes
cause trouble in a particular constituent, or in a clause of complex
sentence."

Bartram and Walton (2001, p.89) give an example to exemplify this:

"Taken on its own, the following would pass unnoticed:

Despite this, Ford has made great progress in the UK market.

until it follows this:

Ford has always targeted the UK as a potential growth area for its
products."

Nevertheless, there are experts who base on different points of view


to classify errors. Lee (1990) sees errors at the linguistic level and at the
level of gravity. Accordingly, those at the linguistic level pertains to
grammatical errors/ morphological syntactic errors containing global and
local errors and discourse errors involved with the mode of discourse
errors, rules of discourse errors and lexical errors. As she proposes, rules
of discourse errors are a synonym to intra-lingual errors. At the level of

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error gravity, as she defines, it is involved with the seriousness of error or
which errors to be corrected to be specific. Error gravity includes errors
that interfere with intelligibility or communication. In other words, they are
the errors that lead to communication breakdown like cohesion and
coherence-related ones. Besides, errors which stigmatize or irritate are
another subtype of error gravity. As its names suggests, this is the type of
errors that "intrudes upon the interlocutor's perception of the
communication." (Ludwig, 1982, p. 275). Nonetheless, it is such subjective
and judgmental a type of errors that it is not the focus of corrective
treatment. Additionally, Lee mentions common errors referring to those
that affect a large group of students and can be easily detected and high
frequency errors related to the repeated occurrence of the same error on the
part of individual students.

On the whole, the most popular classification of written errors that


earns scholars' consensus prevailingly is the division of errors into inter-
language errors, intra-lingual errors and developmental errors. The
elaboration of these categories is illustrated as below:

2.1.4.1. Inter-lingual errors

Inter-language errors, as Richards (1970) points out, are popular


among second language learners. Those are errors caused as a result of the
"characteristics of one language are being carried into another popular
language" (Richards, 1970: 6). To put it in another way, learners have
"carried the habits of his mother tongue into the second language" they are
striving to acquire (Corder, 1971: 158). Thus, this type of errors is very
diverse in form and manifestation as English second language learners
from different cultures and settings will commit different errors of this
type. For example, learners of different cultures have different modes of

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paragraph patterns. As a result, there is likelihood that they will transfer
their mother tongue paragraph pattern into their target language one.
Figure 2 below, as presented by Sokolik (1990), illustrates paragraph
structures by speakers of different languages: extensive parallel
constructions in the Semitic group, an indirect approach in the Oriental
group, the repeated digressions in Romance and Slavic groups, and the
linear English language writing.

English Semitic Oriental Romance Russian

Figure 3: Different paragraph pattern in different languages

Brown (1980) adds that inter-lingual is a common phenomena


among English second language learners during their early stages of
learning a second language, before the system of second language is
familiar, the first language is the only linguistic system that learner can rely
on. When the two languages have the same corresponding features, there
would be a positive transfer from the first language to the second language.
On the other hand, if they do not correspond to each other, it would be
likely that a negative transfer will occur (Ho, 1973). This is a very source
for errors to occur.

2.1.4.2. Intra-lingual errors

The second category of written errors falls to intra-lingual errors.


This category of errors is defined by Richards (1970: 15) as those "that

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reflect the general characteristics of rule learning, such as faulty
generalization, incomplete application of rules and failure to learn
conditions for rule application.” The very source of this type of errors,
according to Richards, originates from the complex structure of English
and students' misinterpretation of grammatical rules due to inadequate
learning, faulty teaching or lack of contrast between both languages.
Brown (1980) states that early stages of language learning are characterized
by the prevailing dominance of inter-lingual transfer errors while intra-
lingual errors are typical for learners at a more advanced competence. In
short, this category of errors deals much with errors related to students'
grammatical and lexical errors at higher competence rather than the first
sub-type of errors.

2.1.4.3. Developmental errors

Richards (1970) gives the definition for developmental errors as


"errors…which do not derive from transfer from another language…they
reflect the learner's competence at a particular stage and illustrate some of
the general characteristics of language acquisition." They are caused as a
result of learner's attempts to "build up hypothesis about the English from
their limited experience of it in the classroom or textbook." (Richards,
1971: 18) In other words, developmental errors are similar to the errors
made by children learning the language as their first language.
Developmental errors are assumed to be a natural product of a gradually
developing ability in the new language. Developmental errors make up the
majority of errors exhibited by second language learners. Examples of
developmental errors are the misuse of third person -s (she work hard), the
-ed morpheme (she teached us last year), of negation (I not like it) and of
interrogatives ( I wonder what is she doing).

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All in all, there is no clear-cut distinction between the three types of
errors presented. As for the same error, it can be classified as inter-lingual
errors for this student but intra-lingual errors for another and
developmental errors for the others. The classification is varied with
regard to different learners; thus, it is vital that teacher well understand
his/her students to work out which type of errors learners are making to
provide necessary correction.

2.1.5. Causes of written errors in the field of English Language


Teaching

It is by no means easy to identify the actual sources of written errors


in the field of English Language Teaching. Some may blame such learner's
inadequacy for inappropriate teaching methods. Others may, on the
contrary, blame learners themselves for conducting those errors. Diverse
as these viewpoints are, there should be an intersection among different
schools of thoughts or a clear-cut justification among them so that these
causes are figured out and proper error correction is offered. In general, the
very causes of written errors can be summed up as below:

2.1.5.1. Mother tongue interference

Mother tongue interference is one of the major causes leading to


leaner's committing errors. Norrish (1987) states that learning a language
(a mother tongue or a foreign language) is a matter of habit formation.
When learner strives to learn a new habit, the old ones will interfere with
the new ones. In other words, the term "first language interference" best
summarizes this phenomenon. Besides, being able to express fully one's
ideas in another language is always a demanding task. Thus, when
learners' second language is not sufficient in expressing themselves, it is
likely that they will rely on their first language to express their ideas. Edge

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(1989: 7) is in line with this thought: "when people do not know how to say
something in a foreign language, one possibility is to use words and
structures from their own language and try to make them fit into the foreign
language." Moreover, the interference of mother tongue may result from
the complication of the structure of the target language as Abbort et al
(1981: 230) argues that "wherever the structures of the first language and
target language differed, there would be problems in learning and difficulty
in performance, and that the greater the differences were, the greater the
difficulties would be."

2.1.5.2. Overgeneralization

Another possible cause of written errors to be mentioned is


overgeneralization. According to Jakobovits (in Richards, 1969: 55-56),
overgeneralization is "the use of previously available strategies in new
situation… In second language learning…some of these strategies will
prove to be helpful but others, perhaps due to superficial similarities, will
be misleading and in applicable." For example, all grammatical persons
except the singular third person in present simple tense carry base-form
verbs; therefore, there is a risk that learners will over-generalize this rule
and omit the "-s" ending after verbs of singular third persons. One of the
main reasons leading to this may derive from teaching techniques. In many
traditional classrooms where traditional methods like Grammar Translation
method are applied, teacher provides students with a variety of exercises so
that they can practice grammatical items. As a result of the over-practice of
these items, they get mixed up and over-generalize rules. In consensus
with this trait, Richards (1970) states that learners create a deviant structure
on account of their limited exposure to different structures in the target
language. Consequently, students automatically apply rules wherein they
are not allowed to.

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2.1.5.3. Ignorance of rule restrictions

According to Richards (1970: 12), the ignorance of rule restrictions


refers to "the application of rules to context they do not". The scholar also
mentions that learners commit this type of errors due to their faulty analogy
and the rote teaching. Out of the two causes, the former may be said to be
a major cause to errors of this category. For example, because of their
limited exposure to target language, learners, once encountering the
preposition concerning with one type of verb, will attempt to apply the
same prepositions with verbs that they detect similarities thanks to the
analogy. To be specific, learners would probably use "about" for the verb
"discuss" as they see that a large number of verbal verbs like "tell, talk and
speak" all go with this preposition. However, this is not the rule to be
applied in this case. Rote teaching also plays a role in learner's ignorance
of restrictions. Such drilling exercises as below make students assume that
the distribution of the verb "make" should be "make sb to do sth" because
they have practiced using a "to-verb infinitive" after "allow, enable, permit"
(extracted from Richards, 1970: 13):

"1. The microscope enables scientists to examine very small objects.

1. A thermometer enables doctors to measure body temperatures.

2. Helicopters enable passengers to land in the city centre.

3. Good production methods enable the factory to manufacture more


cars.

4. Expansion joints permit/allow the pipes to expand or contract.

5. Safety valves permit/allow the steam to escape from the boiler.

6. We permit/allow the metal to cool slowly."

25
2.1.5.4. Incomplete application of rules

As defined by Richards (1970: 15), second language learners'


incomplete application of rules means "the occurrence of structures whose
deviancy represents the degree of development of the rules required to
produce acceptable utterances." For instance, although student has been
excessively taught the form of a proper question, he still uses the statement
form instead of the question form or he just add the question words at the
beginning of the sentence, assuming that he has transferred the statement
into a question. In fact, he has not. For example, such questions as below
may be produced by second language learners:

"What you often do in the evening?"

"You speak English?"

2.1.5.5. False concepts hypothesized

The errors resulting from false concepts hypothesized involve those


that are attributed to "the faulty comprehension of distinction in the target
language" (Richards, 1970: 19). It is also Richards, who states that the two
main grounds leading to this are excessive contrastive-based teaching and
pre-mature contrastive presentation. Excessive contrastive-based teaching
often originates from the stereotype that "presenting items in contrast can
lighten the teacher's and the students' work and consequently speed up the
learning process" (Ruth, 1978: 118). However, this method of teaching
does not always bring the desired effect as William (1968: 129) argues "a
course that concentrate too much on the main trouble spots without due
attention to the structure of the foreign language as a whole will leave the
learner with a patchwork of unfruitful, partial generalization…" In other
words, concentration of the different traits between the two languages may

26
not work because these different features may not be the language items
that are most often needed. On the other hand, once contrastive
presentation is involved, a poor or pre-mature presentation would cost
learner's confusion about the differences between the two languages. The
very consequences of this are that students end up with puzzlement and a
disordered knowledge.

2.2. Error correction

2.2.1. Different views concerning written error correction

Although errors committing is inevitable in the process of learning as


it proves learners are exploring the language, there remains a controversial
issue related to the question whether or not errors should be corrected and
how to correct errors as well. Basically, there are quite a few contrasting
views.

The first school of thought holds that there is no need to correct


learner's errors. Teacher's job is only to point out to learners that an error
has been committed. The other view suggests that errors must be corrected
every time they are detected; otherwise, a bad habit of the wrong use of the
target language will be formed. To some extent, these schools of thought
reach an extreme that would not benefit students to the best. Thus, the
researcher would like to employ the Communicative Language Teaching
approach to error correction. That is, error correction should be provided
when needed because the very goal of this approach is to develop students'
communicative competence and errors are seen as a sign of their real
learning but not a sign of incomplete learning.

In light of which errors earn more attention during the course of


correcting, there also remains a debate. Lee (1990) mentions three kinds of

27
errors that require more concern from teacher namely errors that interfere
with intelligibility or communication, errors which stigmatized or irritate
common errors and high frequency errors (see 1.3). Some scholars like
Edge (1970) and Van et al (1984) are in favor of the approach that much
weight should be attributed to errors that impede the intelligibility of the
message or errors of meaning as Edge terms. Edge (1970: 11) argues that
"the most important sort of errors is errors of meaning…There is no point
in learning to say correct sentences in English if they do not mean what we
want to say." In terms of errors that deserve more concerns from teacher,
the researcher would like to concur with Edge's view that errors that
impede the conveyance of meaning should be a priority to correction since
writing is at first to "express and impress. Writers typically serve two
masters: themselves and their own desires to express an idea or feeling and
readers, also called the audience, who need to have ideas expressed in
certain ways." (Sokolik, 1990: 88). Thus, errors related to failure to convey
messages would be worth correcting most.

2.2.2. Teacher role in written error correction

Traditionally, the role of teacher in error correcting has always been


dominant. Teacher is the only source to both point out the errors and show
how to correct them. Edge (1970) coins the term "over-correct teacher" to
imply this. Teachers always strive to be correct in terms of linguistic form
when they are in class and this poses profound effects on students. Thus,
learners will see that what their teachers priotize is freedom from any kinds
of mistakes or errors. "Even if the teacher tells the students that they should
try to express themselves freely, it will be difficult for the students to
behave in this way when they see that it is not the teacher's way." (Edge,
1970: 74).

28
Besides, teacher assumes the role as the only linguistic model in their
setting for students to look at. Learners always have a strong desire to be
themselves and to be able to express themselves in English. Teacher, to
some extent, has become the model of the same background culture to
enjoy the language, to express himself/ herself in the target language. Thus,
from students' perspectives, teachers earns their status "based on the fact
that they are successful examples of what their students aim to be; people
from a shared background who have achieved an ability to communicate in
English" (Edge, 1970: 76). Therefore, teachers should provide correction
that helps learner to express themselves more accurately and "make
correction a part of the teaching and learning process, not something to
fight against" or "a kind of criticism or punishment" (Edge, 1970: 75).
This is the very status that teachers should assume in error correction.

2.2.3. Techniques in error correction

The techniques for error correction vary in accordance with different


viewpoints of different scholars. First and foremost, it comes to the
identification of written errors. The five steps to detect written errors are
illustrated as following, as stated by Broughton et al (1980: 143):
- The first step is to establish what the errors are. The question to ask
is whether what the student intended to say is the same as what he actually
wrote.
- The second step focuses on establish hypothesis concerning causes
of detected errors.
- Then it comes to the stage of determining the seriousness of errors or
error gravity.
- The fourth step pertains to locating the error into a particular area of
errors.
- Last but not least, it comes to the step of correcting identified errors.

29
The techniques involving how to correct written errors can be
divided into teacher correction techniques and student correction
techniques as a whole, Edge (1970: 24). As for student correction, errors
can be corrected by error conductors' peers. That is, peer correction can
contribute to the stage of error correction. The teacher will not correct the
errors but show students that an error has been committed. Peer correction
can take place at the level of individuals, that is, student-to-student
correction and at the level of a whole class, or whole-class correction as it
is named. This type of correction works well with common errors from
students' tests or exercises. In addition to student correction, there remains
another type of correction, teacher correction with two corresponding sub-
types namely full teacher correction and teacher-student correction. In
terms of full teacher correction, all the errors are corrected by the teacher
and then the feedback is handed back to the students. This kind of
correction is useful for errors of various types and errors that are difficult
for students to correct. The teacher-student technique is implemented as
followed: the teacher provide correction in the form of standard codes
which have been agreed in advance by students and teacher. Students are
left to do the correction work themselves afterwards.

All things considered, these correction techniques have been in use


by many teachers. Preference of which techniques depends a lot on
numerous factors like the seriousness of the errors committed, the level of
the students and the favorite mode of correction that can motivate them.

30
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

This chapter focuses on a detailed depiction of the methodology


applied in this research paper. Specifically, the size and characteristics of
the participants altogether with data collection instruments, data collection
procedures as well as data analysis will be put into justification.

3.1. Participants

The researcher employed the participation of two groups of


participants. Firstly, they are the writing tests of first-year mainstream
students taken from three different points of time during their first
semester. These are the diagnostic test, the mid-term test and the end of
term test to be specific. Due to the researcher's limited access to the tests
as well as the fact that some students missed their end-of-term test, she
could only detect errors on 77 writing samples of each kind of tests, which
makes up a total of 231 ones. These samples were collected from four
different groups namely E15, E17, E21, E23. In fact, the strategy
underlying this procedure of sampling is "random cluster sampling" thanks
to lots-casting. These are all mainstream classes whose students have just
passed the entrance exam to university and at their first step to learn writing
as an independent and significant skill. The distribution of tests in
accordance with the four classes is tabulated as below:

Groups E15 E17 E21 E23

Samples
19 20 19 19
collected

Table 1: Samples collected from each kind of test

31
The large size of the writing samples, 231 in total, which accounts
for one fifth of the total tests, can be considered eligible for representing
the whole population. Furthermore, these samples are expected to provide
the researcher with a more objective look at students' common written
errors when the identification of errors is implemented on three writing
pieces produced by the same student at different points of time. In so doing,
the researcher is supposed to eliminate the possibility that a mistake is mis-
categorized into an error. In addition, thanks to the convenience that all the
samples to be analyzed are collected from official tests, there is a low risk
that students may copy down from the internet or reference books. This
ensures that the writing samples collected are students' own products and it
would contribute greatly to the reliability of the study.

The other participants in the research paper are 10 teachers in charge


of teaching writing skills to first year students chosen randomly via
"random simple sampling". That is, they were picked out at random from
the list of teachers in Division 1 via lots-casting. These teachers are all non-
native language teachers; thus, they share the same background culture and
mother tongue as students. Besides, on account of their job features, they
have frequent contacts with students, which enables them to have an
understanding of students' common written errors. Taking these traits into
consideration, the researcher invited ten of them to take part in the
questionnaire survey. The results gained from the questionnaire would
serve as an assisting tool to support her own analysis of students' common
written errors. The data collected, therefore, would be more reliable.

3.2. Data collection instruments

In order to conduct this study, the researcher has employed two data
collection instruments namely document analysis and survey questionnaire.

32
The combination of these two methods offers the researcher not only
quantitative but also qualitative data for later analysis.

3.2.1. Document analysis

Regarding the very aim and objectives of this study, the researcher
would like to employ document analysis as a feasible method to gain
insights into the research problems. This data collection method is
“considered a research technique that provides objective, systematic and
qualitative data” (Verma and Mallick, 1999). In spite of the large size of
writing samples collected, this method of researching enables the
researcher to summarize a large volume of data into fewer categories
basing on a proper coding system as Stemler (1996) affirms "content
analysis enables researchers to sift through large volumes of data with
relative ease in a systematic fashion". Additionally, it also allows the
researcher to make inferences from data collected, which can be used to
assist the data gained from survey questionnaire as well. However, this data
collection method could be impaired due to the incompleteness or the
missing of students' writing samples. With a stroke of luck, the number of
students' writing tests missed is insignificant enough to ensure the
reliability of the research.

Specifically, document analysis was conducted with a checklist


drafted in advance. The checklist is extracted from the writing syllabus for
first year mainstream students and consists of major errors that students are
expected to conduct at a high frequency. The very purpose of the checklist
is to guarantee a systematic and consistent analysis of students' errors. The
lay-out of the checklist is a three-column table. The first column
categorizes students' errors in groups related to different aspects of a
writing product like syntax, content, grammar, mechanics, organization and

33
word choice. The second column represents typical examples of each
category while the third one is used to list students' errors that the
researcher encountered.

3.2.2. Questionnaire

On account of the researcher’s limited time and finance,


questionnaire proves to be an appropriate method “to get data economically
from a large number of participants” (Verman and Mallick, 1999).
Moreover, the fact that “the employment of open-ended in addition to the
conventional close-ended questions of this method provide more helpful,
reliable data and more accurately reflecting what the respondents want to
say” (Nunnan, 1992) led the researcher to choose questionnaire as one of
the major methods to collect data.
The questionnaire consists of two main parts. The first part enables
the researcher to have an overview on the general information of the
participants including the number of semester they have been teaching
writing to mainstream freshmen. Meanwhile, the second part highlights
teachers' views on students' common errors and their causes. It embodies
two rating questions covering two pages of paper. In fact, these two
questions include a number of different items to rate; thus, the modest
number of questions does not hinder the researcher from collecting data
economically and comprehensively. Additionally, the questionnaire is
written in English because its target respondents are the teachers of English
at a foreign language university. It goes without saying that their level of
proficiency in English is high enough to comprehend what the researcher
would like to express.
Nevertheless, questionnaire remains an imperfect method as
respondents may not be fully aware of the content of the question or they
may not answer truthfully. Therefore, in a move to eliminate this

34
drawback, the questionnaire will be brief and it will also be finished within
the presence of the researcher so that any arising misunderstandings will be
made clear in time.

3.3. Data collection procedure

The data collection procedure is divided into three successive phases.


The elaboration of each phase is clarified as followed:
Phase 1:
The focus of phase one is to deal with the drafting of the checklist to
be used in the document analysis and the questionnaire. As for the
checklist, the researcher, first and foremost, read a volume of documents to
have an overview on typical types of written errors often conducted by
students. Afterwards, she spent time researching common written error
checklists proposed in other studies. This process of researching resulted
in the adaptation of common error checklist from the writing syllabus for
mainstream freshmen at Faculty of English Language Teacher Education,
Hanoi University of Languages and International Studies. The
comprehensiveness and the wide coverage of this checklist led the
researcher to choose it as a tool to analyze students' common written errors.
Nonetheless, for the sake of convenience for later analysis, the checklist
was edited, regrouped and presented in the form of table. The checklist is
attached as an appendix at the end of the research paper.
In terms of the questionnaire, the researcher, at first, spent time
having a close look at the literature related to common written errors to
gain decent background knowledge. Next, a draft questionnaire was
produced to serve as the piloting version in phase two. Since this
questionnaire is aimed to be delivered to teachers in charge of teaching
writing skills for first year students who are already at a high proficiency of

35
English, it is written in English to ensure that terminologies would not be
distorted as a result of translation into Vietnamese.
Phase 2:
This phase concentrates mainly on such tasks as collecting students'
test and piloting the questionnaire. As for the former, the researcher went
through a series of demanding tasks. Firstly, with the aid of her supervisor,
she was enabled to get access to students' diagnostic and mid-term tests by
borrowing them from teachers in charge of teaching writing to four groups
of E15, E17, E21 and E23. Then it came to the photocopying students'
end-of-term tests. However, the access to this resource is limited; hence,
the researcher's supervisor did her a favor when he asked the Dean of
Division 1 for permission to get access to students' writing tests. These 77
writing tests were scattered alphabetically in 23 testing rooms. In an
attempt to sort them out, the researcher had an initial look at their names in
the testing lists of each testing room to pick out their numerical orders in
the lists. It is worth noting that no examinee's personal information is left
on their tests except for the numerical order of their headings. However,
these headings were cut from examinees' tests to ensure fairness during
marking procedure. Thus, the numerical orders found were used to collate
with the numbers on examinees' headings to make out what the number
written on students' tests. The last step is left to picking out students' tests
based on the numerical order written on each test. After that, all of these
77 examinees' tests were borrowed and photocopied to serve the
researcher's later analysis. Finally, they were returned to exactly where
they used to be to ensure that no missing tests occurred.
With regard to the later, the questionnaire was piloted with the
enthusiastic help of one volunteer teacher in the Department. The
researcher also consulted her with advice to improve the questionnaire to
get the desired effect.

36
Phase 3:
This is the last but by no means the least phase in data collection
procedure. It focuses mainly on delivering questionnaire and analyzing
students' writing samples collected in phase two.
With respect to the delivery of the questionnaires, in order to contact
respondents, the researcher had a quick look at the teacher's list provided
for students to pick out the phone numbers of the selected respondents.
Afterwards, she made short phone calls to these respondents to make an
appointment with them as they were all at work and their free time was not
abundant. Prior to respondents' completion of the questionnaire, the
researcher spent a short time explaining briefly what the respondents were
required to do. Additionally, on account of ethical reasons, their
anonymity was pledged. The researcher's presence was also provided
during the respondents' procedure of completing the questionnaire to
explain anything that the respondents were not clear about. Afterwards, all
the questionnaires were collected and the researcher would have a short
look at them to detect any unexpected outcomes and immediate
remediation would be provided.
In terms of the analysis of students' writing samples, the researcher
grouped their writing tests in accordance with their classes for the sake of
convenience in error detecting. Accordingly, with the aid of the checklist
drafted in phase 2, the researcher detected written errors made by the same
students throughout their three official tests of diagnostic, mid-term and
end-of-term tests. Simultaneously, any errors encountered were noted
down to serve as a justification for the researcher's later generalization and
conclusion.

37
3.4. Data analysis methods

The quantitative data obtained from the questionnaire were


calculated and tabulated so that the researcher could analyze and compare
figures conveniently. For example, the percentage of participants who
shared the same ideas or the same average rating would be calculated and
illustrated in a comprehensive table of data.
The qualitative data gained from document analysis were
summarized and categorized according to the taxonomy in the checklist to
best represent the researcher's analysis. A system of color coding in pie
charts, bar charts altogether with tables was adopted to highlight relevant
information.

3.5. Data analysis procedures

First of all, the data collected from the questionnaire, the document
analysis were classified basing on the two research questions. In other
words, the first questions of the questionnaire and the data gained from
analyzing students’ writings will be used to answer the first research
question “What are the common written errors committed by first year
students at the Faculty of English Language Teacher Education (FELTE),
Hanoi University of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Viet
Nam National University, Hanoi?''
The second question of the questionnaire and qualitative data
originated from the analysis of students' writing were employed to answer
the second research question “What are the causes to common written
errors made by first year students at the Faculty of English Language
Teacher Education (FELTE), Hanoi University of Foreign Languages and
International Studies, Viet Nam National University?".

38
Afterwards, numerical data were tabulated and presented in the form
of pie charts, bar charts and tables. Particularly, quantitative data gained
from the questionnaire was tabulated and calculated into percentage. Then,
written errors detected on students' writing samples were categorized based
on the prepared checklist. This step was followed by the counting of the
times that errors of the same category were repeated. Simultaneously,
prominent examples of each category were noted down to exemplify the
researcher's later analysis. Finally, all numerical data will be transferred
into percentage and corresponding charts with relevant coding color system
offered.

39
CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

This chapter serves as a representation of data collected during


research procedure. Accordingly, the interpretation of these data is also
offered to address the two research questions.

4.1. Research question 1

As stated in the previous chapter, the first research question " What
are the common written errors committed by first year students at the
Faculty of English Language Teacher Education, Hanoi University of
Foreign Languages and International Studies, Hanoi?" was answered by
the interpretation of the qualitative data gained from analyzing 231 of
students' writing samples as well as the quantitative data collected from
teachers' survey questionnaire.
Following are the tables and the corresponding bar chart to illustrate
first-year main-stream students' written errors.
WRITTEN ERRORS OF FIRST YEAR
STUDENTS AT ED, HULIS
General items 18.99%
Mechanics 10.34%
Grammar 36.21%
Syntax 13.30%
Lexical items 4.99%
Style 27.84%
Layout 3.64%
Idea organization 2.49%

40
Table 2.1: Written errors of first year students at ED, HULIS as
synthesized from document analysis

Items of
1 (never) 2 3 4 5(always)
errors
Idea
0% 40% 0% 40% 20%
organization
Lexical items 0% 0% 40% 60% 0%
Inappropriate
0% 0% 40% 0% 60%
language style
Grammar 0% 20% 40% 40% 0%
Wrong
20% 60% 0% 20% 0%
format
Mechanics 0% 20% 60% 20% 0%
Expression 0% 0% 20% 40% 40%
Word choice 0% 0% 40% 20% 40%

Table 2.2: Written errors of first year students at ED, HULIS as


synthesized from teachers' questionnaire

In term of table 2.2, the researcher would like to choose the mean 2.5
as the medium indicator. That is, if most of the teachers agree that a certain
item of errors occur above the mean "2.5", it would be consider a common
error and vice versa. Accordingly, 100 percent of the teachers agree that
expression, word choice, inappropriate language style and lexical items are
common errors. In the meantime, 80% of the teachers are in agreement
with the fact that grammar and mechanics are common errors. Another
portion of 60% of the teachers see idea organization as common errors.
This is, to some extent, quite similar to the data presented in Table 2.1.

41
As for Table 2.1, the researcher would like to employ the percentage
of five as the standard figure to determine whether a certain category of
errors falls into the groups of common errors or not. This figure is chosen
due to the fact that 5% would mean that the category is popular with one
twentieth of the population; in other words, at least one out of twenty errors
encountered will fall into these groups. Accordingly, the six most common
errors are those related to grammar, style, general items, syntax, mechanics
and lexical items with the descending percentage of 37.21%, 27.84%,
18.99%, 13.30% 10.34% and 4.99% (roughly 5%) respectively. The types
of errors concerning inappropriate format and illogical idea organization
are less popular. This can be accounted by the fact that the writing samples
collected by the researcher are all produced during students' first semester
wherein the focus is writing informal letters and postcards. Hence, students
are not required to make use of their logical and critical thinking as much
as in argumentative writing.
In order to illustrate data vividly, a bar chart is provided as below.
Particularly, the vertical axis represents the percentage of each category of
errors while the horizontal axis is a set of bars with corresponding coding
color system

40.00%
35.00% General Items
30.00% Mechanics

25.00% Grammar
Syntax
20.00%
lexical items
15.00%
Stlye
10.00% layout
5.00% idea organization
0.00%
1

Figure 4: Written errors of first year students at ED, HULIS

42
The detailed description of each category of errors is provided as
below. First of all, it comes to the interpretation of errors concerning
grammar violation.
Grammar errors:

Grammatical errors
Pronoun agreement mistakes 1.06%
Article mistakes 15.18%
Use gerund 2.59%
Use Noun 0.47%
Noun Number 12.00%
Use pronoun 1.06%
Pronoun reference unclear 0.82%
Voice change 0.35%
Subject and verb agreement 9.06%
Wrong verb tense 13.65%
Verb form 2.94%
Modal problem 0.82%
Auxiliary verbs 2.47%
Use infinitive 1.53%
Incorrect formation/use of conditionals 0.71%
Use possessive form 0.71%
Preposition 20.47%
Wrong use of conjunction/connective 12.12%
Link/combine 0.71%
Add relative pronoun 1.29%

Table 3: Components of grammar errors

43
Pronoun agreement
mistakes
25.00% Article mistakes

Use gerund

Use Noun

20.00% Noun Number

Use pronoun

Pronoun reference unclear

15.00% Voice change

Subject and verb


agreement
Wrong verb tense

10.00% Verb form

Modal problem

Auxiliary verbs
5.00% Use infinitive

Incorrect formation/use of
conditionals
Use possesive form
0.00% preposition
1 Wrong use of
conjunction/connective
Link/combine

Add relative pronoun

Figure 5: Components of grammar errors

As it can be seen from the chart above, errors involving wrong use of
preposition (20.47%), article mistakes (15.18%), wrong verb tense
(13.65%), wrong use of conjunction/connective (12.12%), wrong noun
number (12.00%), and subject/verb agreement (9.06%) earn the most
prevailing occurrence. These figures show the fact that knowledge related
to noun usage (article mistakes, noun number), verb usage (verb tense,
subject and verb agreement) and preposition usage is problematic to
students. In particular, students often omit articles where they are needed
and insert them into inappropriate places.

44
The same phenomenon is encountered when students' preposition
errors are detected. More or least, they insert prepositions after verbs that
do not carry prepositions and omit them after verbs that are in need of, or
they can replace the frequently used preposition with an inappropriate one.
In the meantime, students' wrong use of noun number is seen in erroneous
structures like "each or every + plural nouns" and their false assumption of
the countability of nouns which partially account for their subject and verb
agreement errors. Besides, such structures as "there + to be + N" pose a
problem to students as they fail to determine whether the verb "to be"
should be in singular or plural forms. Additionally, students' putting verbs
into wrong tense results from the fact that they forget to put verbs into past
tense when they are recounting a story or events.

Regarding students' wrong use of connectives and conjunction, they


hardly violate logical rules, that is, they use conjunctions to denote
confliction between ideas where they are indeed supporting each other.
Instead, it is common that students place the FANBOYS (For And Nor But
Or Yet So) conjunction group at the beginning of a sentence. The table
below offers a specific description of the aforementioned errors.
Common
Grammatical Typical examples
errors
Write me soon
Apologize our teacher
Reply me
Preposition Omit prepositions Provide me knowledge
Graduate school
Watch about T.V programmes
Mention to your plan

45
Consider about the time
Telephone to me
Join with us/ in my birthday
Wasting it for playing games
Add prepositions
Prove for her opinion
Suit for you
Answer for your question
Bring for us many useful things
With a high price
Congratulate my brothers in…
Replace During the reading of history
prepositions During 19.00 to 22.00
In other hand
Familiar to
Give me (an) outlook
In (a) clear way
(a) nice garden
Have (a) chance
Article (the) best result
Omit articles
mistakes (the) other side of the problem
Both (the) countryside and (the) town
In such (a) large school/such (a) good
condition
Give me (a) happy time
The next paragraph
The students
Add articles The dinner
Attend the classes

46
Go to the hospital
A good advice
Wrong insertion A best choice
of article A children
A nice people
Today I write this letter…/ I write this card to…
We agreed that we will meet…
Verb tense I'm very happy when I received your letter
You said that you are moving to a different area.
You said that you love watching T.V.
I must go to visit my grandparents on that day. So I can't meet
you.
More and more happy when you ask me to tell you all about my
Conjunction/
favourite programme. And now I'll tell you about it.
Connective
But, there are some shortcomings that make me wonder.
Although its fee is much, it's large and modern. Especially, the
teachers at that school are very well.
Each/every + Plural Nouns
Each others
Every sad things
Every students
Everythings
Noun number Some + Singular countable nouns
Some hobby
Some mistake
Some good point
Some material
Uncountable Nouns in plural forms

47
Equipments
Advices
Informations
There + to be + Noun:
There is many new friends
There is good teachers
Subject/Verb
Singular subject + Plural Verb
agreement
It make me fun and relax me
The story make me…
The author give…

Table 4: Typical examples of common grammar errors

Style errors:

With respect to the second most common errors, style errors, their
elaboration is illustrated as below. The corresponding table shows specific
figures while the pie chart offers a vivid and straightforward representation
of this category of errors.

ERRORS RELATED TO STYLES


Too informal/formal 96.18%
Faulty parallelism 2.55%
Transition needed 1.27%

Table 5: Components of errors related to style

Too
informal/formal
Faulty parallelism

Transition needed

Figure 6: Components of errors related to style 48


Obviously, the most dominant type of style errors is that of
inappropriate language style with two common tendencies accounting more
than 96% of the total errors of the same category. Students, on one hand,
may write in a too informal language style, that is, they integrate elements
of spoken language into written language. On the other hand, they may
overuse lengthy and complicated structures which are supposed to be found
in formal writing though this trend is less popular than the former. Typical
examples are presented in the following table:

Typical example of inappropriate language style


Too informal language style Too formal language style
It's Ok? I would like to notice you that…
Alright According to what you wrote in
And you? your letter…
No The fact is that…
Of course I would like to be visited by you
Right next month.
Hey, Sally I am writing to inform you that…
Got it? I would like to give you a special
Okay thanks for such a nice party.
Uhm
Use contractions like isn't, don't,
won't, etc in writing reflections

Table 6: Typical example of expression errors

Errors related to general items:


In terms of general items, students are most of the time found to
produce lengthy and clumsy sentences or they translate word by word,
which results in Vietnamese-like expression. Thus, errors related to

49
expression accounts for nearly half of the total errors conducted by students
in this kind. In particular, lengthy or clumsy expression is found as
students over-use intensifiers like "very much, really, a lot" or they expand
the sentence unnecessarily whilst it can be shortened instead. For example,
students produce such sentences as "I really enjoyed it a lot" or "I am glad
to know that you move from a large school to another which was smaller"
(instead of "I really enjoyed it" or "I am glad to know that you move from a
large school to a smaller one"). In fact, students are accustomed to the
prevalence of intensifiers in Vietnamese. It is natural for students to
produce sentences like "cô ấy rất xinh đẹp (She is very beautiful)/ tôi rất
thích chạy bộ (I like jogging a lot)/ tôi thực sự thích bong đá rất nhiều ( I
really like football very much)" instead of "cô ấy xinh đẹp (she is beautiful)
/ tôi thích chạy bộ (I like jogging)/ tôi thích bóng đá (I like football)". Thus,
there is a tendency for them to add as many intensifiers as possible;
otherwise, they would feel that they are lacking something significant.
They are not aware of the fact that in certain circumstances, the use of such
intensifiers is not needed as the sentence itself is meaningful and
intelligible. Besides, because of students' word-by-word translation, they
ignore grammatical rules and produce erroneous sentences. For instance,
they would translate "chủ nhật hàng tuần" into English word-by-word as
"Sundays weekly" instead of "every Sunday". Below is the presentation of
data gained and typical examples for expression errors.

GENERAL ITEMS
Meaning unclear 8.75%
Add omitted words 11.11%
Omit words 13.13%
Right words but wrong 22.56%

50
forms
Expression 44.44%

Table 7: Written errors belonging to general items

50.00%
45.00% Meaning unclear
40.00%
35.00%
30.00% Add omitted words
25.00%
20.00%
15.00% Omit words
10.00%
5.00%
0.00% Right words but
Meaning

omitted

Expression
words but
words
unclear

Omit

wrong forms
Add

Right

Expression

Figure 7: Written errors belonging to general items

Prominent examples of lengthy, clumsy or Vietnamese-like


expression are provided as below:

Typical examples of expression errors


Lengthy or clumsy expression Vietnamese-like expression
It makes me easy to understand I see this programme on Sundays
I am partially in disagreement with weekly.
the author's idea. Students are adults but not already.
I am glad to know that you move Students almost don't go to school.
from a large school to another which It's a good idea for someone but not
was smaller. everybody.
If you don't know about the price, In the last place of this story…

51
you will lose little. …arrive Vietnam from USA
I really enjoyed it a lot. I felt like someone stand behind me
I eventually never understand what I was taken part in your party
they say in that programme. Small school in the countryside will
Write to me a reply not enough condition to organize.
His hurt is serious very much. My special favourite programme…
I'm glad to write to tell you that I I have to move to a new place which
was interested in the party you gave is far from my village many times.
me yesterday However, nevermind, with your
I prepared dinner on the table study you can learn at the best
school.

Table 8: Examples of expression errors

Syntax errors
With regard to syntactic errors, the dominant occurrence belongs to
fragment error (39.42%) and it is roughly followed by wrong order and
run-on sentence error with the portion of 15.38% and 10.1% respectively.
Specific data and a corresponding pie chart are presented as below:

Syntax errors (%)


Fragment error 39.42%
Run-on sentence 10.1%
Subject/verb needed 9.62%
Wrong order 15.38%
Sentence structure 2.4%

Table 9: Common written errors related to syntax

52
Fragment error

Run-on sentence

Subject/verb
needed
Wrong order

Sentence
structure

Figure 8: Common written errors related to verb usage

With reference to fragment error, there is a widespread use of


subordinating clauses as an independent sentence among students. The
presence of such subordinators as "although/though, because" at the very
beginning of the sentence is popular. On the contrary, some students join a
number of single sentences into a long and complex sentence, which not
only irritates readers but also hinder their interpretation of the sentence
meaning. Earning a slightly higher portion compared to that of run-on
sentence errors is those of wrong word order. The most popular
phenomenon in this kind of errors is the misplacement of adverbs in a
sentence. For example, students usually put adverbs of manner right after
the verb itself regardless of the length of the accompanying object. They
may write "complete successfully the project" instead of "complete the
project successfully". Following are representative examples of the errors
under discussion.

Common
syntactic Typical examples
errors

53
.Some knowledge you can only get from the teacher.
.As it will give you more chance.
Fragment
.Especially I liked the food.
error
.Because the party was so wonderful.
.The subject whether or not they like.
Misplacement of adverbs:
- Adverb of frequency: have been never…
- Adverbs of manner: complete successfully their project/
find easily a good job
Wrong Order
- Adverb of time: What do you think about next week on
Tuesday?
- Adverb of degree: The most thing I remember/ I liked
best the music at the party.
The story he tells is only one case, there are still many people
who is very hard-working at school and the results in a good
future, and someone who spent much time on part-time jobs
couldn't finish their time at university.
Knowing that you and your family are going to move to a
Run-on different area and you are considering about going to a small
sentence school in the countryside or in the centre of town, I'm writing
to give you my advice.
When I read this story, I like very much because it can advises
me what I should do when I am a student and I think that I
should attend the classes regularly in order to that I can gain
more skills and improve my knowledge at university.

Table 10: Typical examples of common syntax errors

54
Mechanics errors

Data concerning mechanics errors are tabulated in the following


table and clearly presented in the pie chart followed.
MECHANICS ERRORS
Capitalize 10.27%
Incorrect punctuation 45.21%
Incorrect spelling 44.52%

Table 11: Components of mechanics errors

Capitalize

Incorrect
punctuation
Incorrect spelling

Figure 9: Components of mechanics Errors

As it is shown from Figure 9, the two most prevailing mechanics


errors falls into those of incorrect punctuation and incorrect spelling.
Although wrong punctuation and spelling hardly impede meaning
conveying, they signify readers of students' inproficiency in English and
may irritate readers because of such trivial errors. Below is a table
representing examples of these two kinds of mechanics errors.
Common Mechanics errors
Incorrect punctuation Incorrect spelling
. So that, Prepaired/ developed
. Although, Althought/ affort

55
, such as: Emagining/convinient/
For example: sociaty/ rubbits
As a result: Persuative
Dear Sally!

Table 12: Examples of common mechanics errors

Lexical items

Students' lexical errors are much concerned with the wrong choice of
words or wrong use of words in inappropriate contexts. Thanks to the
analysis of students' writing samples, the research finds that lexical errors
result from the fact that students do not master words' collocation or
semantic meaning of a word or they translate words by words into the
target language.

To be specific, collocation refers to typical combinations of words


such as "strong tea" or "crystal clear" which is an essential aspect of
English language learning. It is well-known that English language learner,
even advanced ones, often struggle with English collocations (Granger,
1998). Hence, the fact that those freshmen produce collocation errors is
inevitable and the production of such combinations as hot topics (heated
topic), scare crazily (scared to death), etc are understandable.

In addition to collocation errors, wrong use of semantic meaning of a


word is to denote students' unawareness of its context-free meaning. To
put it in another way, students fail to incorporate semantic features of a
word; what they bear in their minds is the equivalent in Vietnamese only.
For instance, students neglect the semantic feature of "truthful" as "attached
to human personality" and just keep that of "related to reality" and the

56
Vietnamese equivalent, "chân thật". As a result, students produce an
erroneous sentence like "the story is truthful" unconsciously.

Another manifestation of lexical errors is involved with word-by-


word translation. That is, students put words by words mechanically
basing on their equivalent meaning in Vietnamese. Accordingly, to express
the phrase "kinh nghiệm thực tế", it is likely that students would translated
"kinh nghiệm" into "experience" and "thực tế" into "fact", which would
results in the production of the noun phrase "fact experience", an odd in
standard English.

A detailed table with examples to illustrate this category of errors is


provided as below.
Lexical Items
Word-by-word
Collocation Semantic meaning
translation
Overcome questions The story is truthful Fact experience
Open HBO channel Qualified equipment Join part-time jobs
Scare crazily I assure that you will Events lasting
Comfortable reasons like it throughout the world
Hot topic Recover from the pain I enter a complex
Shoot fireworks It makes his opinion problem
more believable
The news may be
honest

Table 13: Typical examples of lexical Items

All things considered, the elaboration of six common written errors


namely grammar, style, general items, syntax, mechanics and lexical items
and the detailed description of their corresponding sub-categories has

57
offered an overall picture of common written errors produced by main-
stream first year students at English Department, Hanoi University of
Languages and International Studies. All the issues under discussion are
tabulated as following.
COMMON WRITTEN ERRORS
Common
Common sub-categories
Categories
1.1.1.Omit preposition
1.1.2. Add preposition
1.1. Preposition
1.1.3. Replace
preposition
1.2.1. Omit articles
1.2. Article mistakes 1.2.2. Add articles
1.2.3. Replace articles
1.3. Wrong verb tense
1.4. Wrong conjunction/connective
1. Grammar 1.5.1.Each/Every +
Plural Nouns
1.5.2. Some + Singular
1.5. Noun number
countable nouns
1.5.3. Uncountable
Nouns in plural forms
1.6.1. There + to be +
Noun
1.6. Subject/verb agreement
1.6.2. Singular subject +
Plural Verb
2.1. Too formal language style
2. Style
2.2. Too informal language style

58
3.1. Lengthy/ clumsy expression
3. General items
3.2. Vietnamese expression
4.1. Fragment error
4.2.1. Misplacement of
4. Syntax 4.2. Wrong word order
adverbs
4.3. Run-on sentence
5.1. Incorrect punctuation
5. Mechanics
5.2. Incorrect spelling
6.1.1. Collocation
6.1.2. Semantic
6.1.Wrong word/ Word
6. Lexical items meaning
choice
6.1.3. Word-by-word
translation

Table 14: Common written Errors of first year main-stream students


at English Department, HULIS

4. 2. Research question 2

With a view to addressing the second research question "What are


the causes to common written errors made by first year students at the
Faculty of English Language Teacher Education, Hanoi University of
Foreign Languages and International Studies, Hanoi?", the researcher
would like to rely on the theoretical background as presented in chapter 2
concerning the causes of second language learners' written errors combined
with quantitative data gained from teachers' survey questionnaire to
determine the very causes to students' common errors. Accordingly, the
researcher has identified five major causes namely mother tongue
interference, overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions, incomplete
application of rules and false concept hypothesized.

59
With reference to the data collected from teachers' survey
questionnaire, it can be seen that there does not exist a consensus among
teachers as to which causes assume a more degree of significance. The
diversity is illustrated in the table below. The continuum from one to five
corresponds with the rating from the most significant to the least
significant. The percentage represents the number of teachers sharing the
same perspective.
Degree of
1 (most 5 (least
significance 2 3 4
significant) significant)
Causes

Mother tongue
60% 20% 0% 0% 20%
interference

Overgeneralization 20% 40% 40% 0% 0%

Ignorance of rule
0% 20% 20% 40% 20%
restrictions

Incomplete
20% 0% 20% 20% 40%
application of rules

False concepts
0% 20% 20% 40% 20%
hypothesized

Table 15: Teachers' rating the significance of causes to students'


common written errors

The researcher would like to employ the figure "2.5" as a medium


mean to determine whether a certain cause is significant or not in students'
production of errors. Table 15 shows that most of the teachers (80%) agree
that mother tongue interference assume a leading cause to students' written

60
errors. Then it comes to the overgeneralization and ignorance of rule
restrictions with the portion of 100% and 40% respectively. The least and
nearly least significant causes belong to incomplete application of rules and
false concepts hypothesized with 40% of the respondents' concurrence.

By the same token, data gained from document analysis prove that
mother tongue interference, overgeneralization and ignorance of rule
restrictions are among the three most significant causes. However, the
ranks between incomplete application of rules and false concept
hypothesized permute with each other. Specific figures and corresponding
chart are offered as following:

Causes of written errors Percentage of occurrence


Mother tongue interference 28.00%
Overgeneralization 28.00%
Ignorance of rule restrictions 20.00%
Incomplete application of rules 12.00%
False concept hypothesized 12.00%

Table 16: The popularity of each kind of causes to students' common


written errors

61
30.00%
mother tongue
25.00% interference
Overgeneralization
20.00%

15.00% Ignorance of rule


restrictions
10.00% incomplete
application of rules
5.00%
False concept
0.00% hypothesised
1

Figure 10: The popularity of each kind of causes to students' common


written errors

The detailed discussion and justification of each cause is provided as


below.

Mother tongue interference

As defined in chapter 2, mother tongue interference is due to the fact


that students carry the characteristics of their native language, Vietnamese,
in to the target language, English. Hinkel (2002: 31-32) identifies these
characteristics as following:

"The purpose of a text (in Vietnamese) (e.g. an essay thesis) is


delayed until the end of the piece of writing, causing it to be inductive
rather than deductive as is common in Anglo-American writing. The goal
of such discourse organization is to convince the reader of the validity of
the writer's opinion and lead the audience to support the writer's stance,

62
instead of employing over persuasion, which may be considered to be
excessively direct and forceful.

…(Writers) place the responsibility for text clarity and explication


on the reader and not on the writer as is considered to be the norm in
written discourse in English. That is, the writer is vested with the authority
to be ambiguous, vague and indirect, and it is the readers' task to tease out
the text's meaning and purpose."

Hinkel's stance can be interpreted as the popularity of indirectness in


Vietnamese English learners. This can account for students' deficiency in
errors related to lengthy and clumsy expression. Moreover, it is a matter of
fact that students can hardly think in the target language at first hand. They
are to resort to their mother tongue in order to think logically; then they
would translate what they have just thought into the target language.
Therefore, there is a likelihood that students will produce the phrase
"prepare the dinner on the table" instead of "lay the table", or "people who
were there were all humorous and out-going" instead of "people at the party
were all humorous and out-going", or "move from a large school to another
one which was smaller" instead of "move from a large school to a smaller
one." Moreover, the translation is, most of the time, word-by-word, which
leads to the wrong order of words in a sentence. Modifiers and adverbs are
put in to places wherein they are not to be. For instance, "where took place
the party" instead of "where the party took place" is the very consequence
of translating word-by-word "nơi tổ chức bữa tiệc", or "find easily a good
job" for "find a good job easily" as a reference to the translation of "tìm
kiếm dễ dàng một công việc tốt".

Besides, characteristics of Vietnamese syntax also pose certain


transfers to learners producing their own English. In Vietnamese, such

63
conjunctions/ connectives as "Và, bởi vậy/vì vậy, mặc dầu vậy…nhưng
mà…, nhưng" can be used at the beginning of a sentence and serve as an
introduction of an independent sentence. Thus, it is common for
Vietnamese students to use "And, so, although…but…, but" at the
beginning of a sentence and they use these conjunction as preceding
elements of an independent sentence, though they must be used in a
subordinating clause instead. This partially accounts for students' incorrect
use of punctuation. That is, in Vietnamese, it is standard grammar that
commas can be used after such conjunctions as "tuy nhiên, mặc dầu vậy, vì
vậy, nhưng mà". As a result, students will take it for granted that they can
apply the same rule in English. They will add commas after conjunctions
like "although, so, but" while it is indeed deviant.

In addition to the different syntax between the two languages,


Vietnamese morphological system corresponding with its phonological
system imposes certain impacts on students' spelling errors. In other
words, a certain word will be read exactly as how it is written.
Nonetheless, this is not the case to be applied in English. This language is
notorious for it inhomogeneity between its morphology and phonology.
Thus, such spelling errors as "convinient" instead of "convenient",
"emagining" for "imagining", "dicision" for "decision", "sociaty" for
"society" and "belive" for "believe" earn a prevailing occurrence.

In short, mother tongue interference is relatively popular among


students' written errors. It not only makes students' writing less smooth but
also impedes the conveyance of meaning at times.

Overgeneralization

Overgeneralization is present in errors related to noun number,


subject and verb agreement, and too formal language style. In particular,

64
students overgeneralize the rule that every expression of quality which is
used to denote the concept of "plurality" will be followed by a plural noun.
Students, therefore, would see that "every" also denotes a plurality concept
and accordingly, it should be accompanied by plural nouns. For example,
students would be likely to produce errors like "everythings, every people,
every bad things". They may also expand the rule that plural nouns taking
zero articles refer to a group of people or things and adopt it to non-count
noun. Hence, it is common to encounter such errors as "advices,
equipments, informations."

Additionally, the structure "there + to be + Noun" seems problematic


to students as they assume that any elements at the beginning of a sentence
should be the subject and the number of verbs are supposed to be in
accordance with the number of subject. Thus, they may see that "there"
belongs to a singular subject and it must go with singular verbs. In fact, the
number of the verb "to be" should be determined by the nearest noun
following it. This accounts for the presence of such sentences as "there is
many new friends/ there is many facilities at the centre of town", etc.

Ignorance of rule restrictions:

The presence of ignorance of rule restrictions is seen in errors


concerning lexical items and prepositions usage. Specifically, students
often ignore the restriction of contexts wherein rules are applied and
produce a deviant form or structure. For example, on account of students'
limited knowledge of the language, they may use adjectives like "truthful,
honest", which refer to human characteristics to denote thing characteristics
while these two words all belong to the semantic field of being "real".
Such sentences as "the story is truthful or the news is honest" can be
detected among students' writing samples. Furthermore, it does not come

65
as a surprise that students unconsciously put words into a surrounding
where they are supposed not to appear. Terminologically, collocation
aspect of the language is troublesome to students. In other words, students
ignore the restriction use of verbs like "overcome, open, shoot"; thus, they
produce such combination as "overcome your question, open HBO channel
and shoot fireworks".

Besides lexical items, ignorance of rule restriction also results from


students' analogy which can be seen in their wrong use of preposition. For
example, student may infer that preposition "for" indicates "purpose" or the
object targeted at, which is evident for the usage of "for" in "there is a letter
for you", "it's a book for children", "we got a new table for the dinning
room" or "this is the place for me". As a result, there is a tendency for
students to use "for" in such structures as "write for me", "wasting it for
playing games", "prove for her opinion", "introduce for you", "suit for you"
whilst it is not the right use of "for" in such situations.

Incomplete application of rules:

As stated in chapter two, incomplete application of rules has much to


deal with students' inability to apply rules into contexts although they have
been taught that language item many times. This type of cause is
prevailing in errors related to verb tense and article usage. In terms of the
former, the use of past simple tense and present continuous tense is
problematic to students. Although they have been taught that the present
continuous tense is used to denote a "happening action at the time of
speaking" and the past simple tense is for recounting a happened event in
the past, they still fail to apply the rules. For examples, students produce
sentences like "today, I write to you to tell you about my favourite
programme" or "I write this card to thank you about your party yesterday"

66
instead of "today I'm writing to tell you about my favourite programme"
and "I'm writing this card to thank you for your birthday party yesterday".

As for the later – article usage, there is a widespread trend that


students omit or add articles to wherein they are not supposed to appear.
For example, it is necessary that article "the" precede the structure of
"ordinal number + noun". Nevertheless, students omit the definite article in
this case and produce phrases like "Ø second paragraph". In a great
contrast, students may add article "the" preceding ordinal number "next"
such as "the next paragraph". This may be explained by the fact that there
are a variety of rules to apply in English. Students' desires to communicate
in English exceed their desires to be correct in English; thus, they omit
rules automatically to lessen their burden.

False concepts hypothesized

Due to students' limited exposure to the second language and their


unawareness of the differences between the two languages, it is likely for
them to form a false hypothesis of the target language. This provides the
explanation for students' inappropriate use of language style. Students
create inappropriate language style in two dimensions: either too formal or
too informal. Too informal language style results from students' adaptation
of spoken language into written language. Students falsely assume that
when the target audience is over-familiar with them, integration of spoken
elements involving short questions like "Right?/ And you?/ Okay?" will
characterize the informality of their letter. This is indeed a violation of
language style as written language is more or least different from spoken
language.

In an adverse dimension, students may resort to highly formal


structures to use in informal writing because of their false assumption that

67
complexity in structures proves a high proficiency of the target language.
In the mean time, complexity in informal writing is not expected in
standard written English. This phenomenon can be exemplified by the
presence of such structures as "I would like to be visited by you next week/
I'm writing to inform you that …" in an informal piece of writing.

To sum up, the aforementioned justification of the actual causes to


students' common written errors has proposed a panorama on the research
problem. Relative as it is, this justification has offered further insights into
the five major causes to students' written errors involving mother tongue
interference, overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions, incomplete
application of rules and false concept hypothesized.

68
CHAPTER 5: RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on the theoretical background presented in chapter two and


the main findings revealed in chapter four, the researchers would like to
propose the following recommendations in the hope that these minor
suggestions could benefit teachers as well as other possible researchers.

With reference to the characteristics of first-year main-stream


students at the Faculty of English Language Teacher Education, HULIS,
they have all finished a 12-year education programme and they have all
acquired a decent volume of knowledge of English like grammar, lexical
items and syntax to be specific. Thus, their focuses at university is
improving four specific skills in English and studying such specializing
subjects as phonetics and phonology, grammar, cross culture
communication and discourse analysis, etc. There would be no chance for
them to revise the language items they have learnt during their high school
years like verb tenses, passive voice, indirect speech, etc. Hence, the
researcher would like to propose techniques to eliminate students' errors
and to foster their knowledge but not how to re-teach these language items.

As presented in the definition of errors, students are unconscious of


the fact that they are producing a deviant language form; therefore, the aid
of other individuals would be precious. Below are two common techniques
used in classroom to help students correct their errors.

5.1. Peer-correction

The help provided from students' peers are highly appreciated as it


benefits students in many ways. Students' active involvement in correcting
their peers' errors would encourage them to think critically and engage
them intellectually during the process of error correction. Besides, a

69
cooperative environment would be created and there would be a shift from
the teacher as the main corrector to students as beneficiaries and correction
providers. That is, two head are always better than one.

Peer correction can be conducted in the form of pair work, group


work or whole class correction. When students have finished their writing,
the teacher asks students to sit in pairs or groups, exchanging each other's
work, find the errors and correct them. It is advisable that students of
higher competence work in groups with weaker ones. Peer correction in
pairs or groups can be implemented as the following diagram (as proposed
by Bartram and Walton, 2001)

F
A B

C D
G
E

= PAIR WORK = GROUP WORK

Figure 11: Pair work and group work in peer correction

In order to diversify group work correction activity, teachers can


divide the class into four groups of four to five members. Each week, there
will be a group in charge of correcting all the class's writings. These four
groups will take turns to be the correction group. Accordingly, each
student in the correction group will have a paper of his/her own and two or
three papers of their peers to comment on. In so doing, students' correction
will not be limited to the one in their pairs groups. They will be enabled to
approach the whole class's writings and learn from their errors.

70
Alternatively, the teacher can offer a chance for the whole class to
participate in the correction process by organizing whole class
organization. That is, the teacher will select the most common and the most
serious errors to write on the blackboard. The whole class will contribute
ideas as to how to correct the errors. This way helps the whole class learn
from typical errors.

5.2. Teacher correction

Teachers need not to be an over-corrector, that is, point outs and


corrects all errors detected. Instead, they can employ the following
techniques to deal with errors.

Firstly, with each set of student papers, there is no point in trying to


mark all the errors. It is advisable that teachers decide in advance what
kinds of errors they are going to deal with. Another alternative is that
teachers can choose to mark errors that affect the intelligibility of the
writing. For instance, the following sentence "English language use much
people" are erroneous. "Much" needs to be replaced by "many", the
definite article "the" should be added before "English" and the word order
in the sentence should be changed. However, the first two errors does not
impede meaning as much as the other; consequently, it is the word order
that should be corrected here. That is, much people use English language.

Secondly, it is important for teachers to bear in mind that errors are


to be examined carefully. Careful analysis of the cause of errors is required
in this case. For instance, when students use "catched" instead of "caught"
in the past simple, teachers will see that they are aware of the regular verbs
but are problematic with irregular verbs. That they add "ed" to "catch"
instead of using its irregular form may be accounted by their analogy with
"watched"- a regular verb with almost similar spelling. In light of students'

71
errors, teacher can plan their syllabus for the next class. In the case of the
above example, teachers may plan a guided composition in which a student
writes a story in the past tense.

Thirdly, teachers should first and foremost search for what students
have done correctly. Often, a piece of writing contains both correctly and
incorrectly used forms. The students need to have it pointed out that they
have demonstrated the correct grammatical feature and they can use the
correct form easily.

In addition to that, teacher should bear in mind that certain errors


require different techniques to correct. Those like "peer-correction" and
"teacher correction" are very sources to rely on. Peer correction is a
popular and favourite technique. This technique can be effective as it
encourages students to be responsible for each other, allows them to share
ideas, and teaches them to read critically. .

Finally, teachers should not turn a writing course into a grammar


course because of the presence of language problems. Teacher can also
provide extra task for students to carry out to enforce what students have
learnt. The task can be designed in the form of game to interest students.
Below are some suggested tasks.

ERROR MAZE (extracted from Batram & Wallon, 2001)

This task is useful for the correction of comprehensive errors or any


specific types of errors.

The students are given a maze with numbers connected by black and
white arrows. Below the maze are 15 sentences, some of which are correct
and some wrong.

72
Clear instructions are essential. The students' task is to start at the IN
sentence, visit each number once, and arrive at OUT. First they read the IN
sentence, if they think it is correct, they follow the white arrow to sentence
3; if they think it is wrong, they follow the black arrow to sentence 14.
They then continue in the same way, follow the white arrow if the sentence
is correct and the black if it is wrong.

IN: I was such tired that I fell asleep.

1. I wish I'd left school at 16 instead of 18.

2. Thanks, but you really should have bothered.

3. Two people were asked to take part in the experiment.

4. If I were you, I'd stay at the Grand Hotel.

5. He apologized for being late.

6. If I'll be away, I'll get someone else to do it.

7. It is the prettiest town I have ever seen.

8. When I was young, I used to playing football in the park.

9. As soon as I left school, I got a job.

10. The "No smoking" sign means you don't have to smoke in here.

11. She told me to meet her outside the British Museum.

12. If I find $5 in the street, I would take it to the police.

13. However he's good at English, he never does his homework.

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14. If I didn't miss the bus to the airport, I would have been on the plane
which crashed!

7 13 4
9
2
OUT 10
6
8 14

5
11
12

IN
1 3

Figure 12: Error Maze

GRAMMAR AUCTION

(Extracted from Grammar Games Batram and Wallon)

This game works well when teachers long students to pay particular
attention to grammatical errors as it has been proved that grammatical
errors lie among the most common written errors by first year students.

The game proceeds exactly the same as an auction. The class is


divided into groups of four or five. Each group has $5000 to spend, and
they should spend as little money as possible. The winning group is the
one that has bought the most correct sentences. If two groups share the
same number of correct sentences, which one spend less will be the winner.

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Prior to the beginning of the game, students are allowed to have a
certain amount of time to determine among provided sentences, which one
is correct and which one is not. They also decide on how much money
they would like to spend on each correct sentence. It is worth noting that
sentences that are difficult to tell whether they are true or not should be
included.
Below is an example of an auction game:
Right or Wrong? Budget
1. Do you have some sugar? _____________ ______
2. I'm very fond of the classical music. _____________ ______
3. She spent $60 for a new dress. _____________ ______
4. Would you like to come round for _____________ ______
supper tonight?
5. This is the best fish I've ever had. _____________ ______
6. She works like a waitress in a _____________ ______
French restaurant.
7. If I could, I would. _____________ ______
8. Turn it off, would you? _____________ ______
9. The bank in Queen Street has _____________ ______
been robbed yesterday.
10. This man worked by my _____________ ______
uncle for ten years.

COLLOCATION PRACTICE
(extracted from Bartram & Wakton)

It is helpful to prepare learners with collocation practice before


asking them to produce a piece of writing. As revealed in chapter four,

75
collocation is one major reason leading to students' deviancy in lexical
items. Thus, a well-prepared task can help students eliminate collocation
errors.
Teacher chooses a noun that is important for the theme. Students are
then asked to list five adjectives or nouns that precede immediately the key
noun, three nouns that can follow the key noun immediately and five verbs
that can be the immediate antecedent of the key noun.
Then it comes to students' comparison in pairs or groups and they
will eliminate the least interesting word like old, big, etc. Afterwards, the
groups or pairs will report to the whole class. Finally, teacher suggests
other possible collocations.
Teacher may prepare a card for students to write on. The card may
look like this:
Verbs Adjectives/Nouns

(Key words)

Table 17: Collocation practice table

All things considered, there exists a variety of correction techniques.


It is unfair to judge which techniques is more helpful than the others.
However, teachers have to base on the level of students, their preferences
and the type of errors committed to provide the most suitable remediation.

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CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION

This chapter is supposed to review the major findings presented in


chapter four and limitations of the research paper would also be presented
so that it can server as an aiding tool for later researchers.

6.1. Main findings

Generally speaking, the research paper has pinpointed two main


findings, namely the common written errors made by first year mainstream
students and the causes to these errors.

As for the former, the researcher has detected six types of common
written errors made by first year mainstream students at English
Department, HULIS. They are grammar, style, general items (language
style and expression in particular), syntax, mechanics and lexical items. It
comes as a surprise that grammatical errors make up the highest portion
among common errors detected. Those students, whose writing samples
are collected, are all newcomers at university. However, in order to be
admitted to this university, they were all to deal with a national-wide
sorting exam. Only students of decent capacity can be admitted to
university. Thus, they are expected to acquire a relative volume of
grammatical items and only minor grammatical errors are accepted as a
result of students' carelessness or slips of pens. Nonetheless, the dominant
appearance of grammatical errors claims a different panorama. This means
that English grammar is problematic to first year mainstream students at
English Department, HULIS.

In terms of the later, the overwhelming presence of mother tongue


interference among the very causes to students' written errors is predictable.
It is of nature that students will resort to their first language to express what

77
they would like to convey when they do not have the relevant second
language in hands. Besides, as students fail to express themselves
concisely, there is a tendency for them to express in a lengthy and
complexly grammaticalized way. Thus, students are at a risk to produce
both collocation/expression errors and grammatical errors simultaneously.

6.2. Limitations of the study

On account of the researcher's limited time, resources and capacity,


she could not investigate further into error correction, a closely related
aspect to errors identification, at the Faculty of English Language Teacher
Education, HULIS. If further study had been carried out in the field of
error correction, the study would be more in-depth and valuable.
Therefore, any studies on this field would be highly appreciated.

Besides, although the researcher developed an error checklist to


remain the consistency and objectivity throughout the research procedure,
the job of error identification implemented by the researcher is, to some
extent, subjective. Hence, the reliability of the research could be counter-
affected. In addition to this, the work of identifying the causes to students'
written errors is mainly based on the researcher's personal stance with the
aid of theoretical background presented previously. Thus, the justification
of causes of common written errors in chapter 5 is not highly satisfactory.
Moreover, the same error may result from different sources of causes. The
researcher only counts on the most prevailing degree of frequency to
determine whether a certain cause is responsible for a specific category of
errors. It is not to mention the fact that the researcher identifies the causes
of errors separately from error conductors and she bears no background
understanding of their personal characteristics. This may lead to
subjectivity or a fallacy of the results under discussion.

78
REFERENCES

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Routledge
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Burt, M.K and Kiparsky, C. (1974). Students' errors and the learning of
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Corder, S.O. (1967) Error analysis and Interlanguage. Oxford: Oxford
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Crystal (in Lee), D. (1987) A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics.
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Edge, J. (1997) Mistakes and correction. New York: Longman, (p.10-50).
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Jakobovits (in Richards), L.A. (1969). A psycholinguistic Analysis of
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Ruth Hok, Constrast: An effective teaching device. English language


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Sokolik, M. (1990). Writing. University of California. Berkeley (USA)
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APPENDIX 1
QUESTIONNAIRE

Part 1: General information

Number of semesters of teaching writing skills to first year students……….

Part 2: Questions:

1. How often do your students make written errors on the following


items? (write one number in the 1-5 continuum in the row provided)
Never Always
Items of Frequency
errors 1 2 3 4 5
Idea organization
Lexical items
In appropriate language style
Grammar
Wrong format
Mechanics (punctuation and spelling)
Expression
Word choice

2. In your opinion, what are the major causes to students' written


errors?
Please rate them from 1 (most significant) to 5 (least significant causes)
in correspondence with these five choices:

82
Diagnostic End-of-term
ITEMS Specific errors Mid-term test
test test

A. Mother tongue interference: Students carry the characteristics of their


first language into the target language.
B. Overgeneralization: Students use the available strategies to apply in
new situations.
C. Ignorance of rule restrictions: Students apply rules to context they do
not.
D. Incomplete application of rules: Although students have been taught
that language rules many times, they fail to apply them.
E. False concepts hypothesized: Students have a false comprehension of
distinction in the target language.
Your rating:

1: ……… 2: ……… 3: ……… 4: ……… 5: ………

-----------------------------

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APPENDIX 2- ERROR CHECKLIST

TransitionSUB-CATEGORIES
needed Diagnostic Mid-term test End-of-term
ITEMS
LAY-OUT Wrong format test test
Meaning
New unclear
paragraph
IDEA
ORGANIZATI
Coherence
Add omitted(one idea does not lead to the
words
GENERAL
ON next)
Omit words
ITEMS
Lack
Rightof paragraph
word unity
but wrong forms
Expression (affected by L1)
MECHANICS
Capitalize
Incorrect Punctuation
Pronoun agreement
mistake
Article mistake
Use gerund
NOUN Use noun
Number (singular <->
plural)
Use pronoun
Pronoun reference
unclear
Voice change
GRAMMAR Subject/verb agreement
Wrong verb tense
Incorrect verb form
VERB Modal problem
Auxiliary verb
Use infinitive
Incorrect use/formation
of a conditional sentence
Use Adjective
MODIFIERS Use Adverb
Use possessive form
PREPOSITIONSWrong use of preposition
Fragment error
Run-on sentence
SYNTAX Subject/verb needed
Wrong order
Sentence structure
Wrong used oft conjunction/ connective
CONNECTOR
S Link/combine
Add relative pronoun
LEXICAL Incorrect spelling
ITEMS Word choice/ wrong word
STYLE Too informal
Faulty parallelism
Improve topic sentence

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