Making Sense of Errors Made by Analytical Chemistry Students in Their Writing

Abstract

Abstract-This paper investigates the influence of the writing errors made by first year Chemistry students at CPUT. The aim is to determine their pedagogic implications. Effectively, students writing in a second language at university exhibits linguistic errors which when properly defined and corrected can promote epistemological access to and mastery of disciplinary knowledge. Error Analysis provided theoretical and analytical framework for this study. Unlike classical Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA) analyses all sources of errors (Sanal, 2008). EA suggests that the learners' learning strategies are the main causes of errors. These errors are: 'transfer', 'overgeneralisation', 'simplification', 'avoidance' and 'overproduction' (Zhuang, 2011). This qualitative study examined and analysed a corpus of Chemistry 1 students' essays. It was found that mother tongue interference, syntactic and morphological errors, misapplication of essay construction rules, punctuation and spelling errors compromise the quality, meaning and rhetoricality. Essentially, the results provided feedback to the lecturers regarding the nature of students' writing errors and how have the students progressed toward the acquisition of academic language. Therefore, the study establishes the need for a tailored academic literacy intervention to promote academic language proficiency in the Chemistry discipline.

Error Analysis in Academic Writing: A Case of International Postgraduate Students in Malaysia

“…The possible explanation is the influence of their first language in general and lack of experience in academic writing in particular. The results of this study accentuate Katiya et al, (2015) study in that two prevailing errors identified are intralingual (incomplete application of rules, faulty generalisation and failure to learn conditions under which rules apply) and developmental errors (making hypothesis about the target language based on the limited experience). It also is in line with Ahmadvand (2008) cited in Heydari and Bagheri (2012) that regarded mother tongue as a source of Iranian students errors.…”

“…Many studies were conducted to analyze students' errors in the English as a second or foreign language context in providing insights for teachers, researchers and students as mentioned earlier. Katiya et al, (2015), for instance, examined and analysed a corpus of Chemistry first year students' essays. The researcher discovered that mother tongue interference, punctuation and spelling errors, misapplication of essay construction rules and syntactic and morphological errors compromised the quality, meaning and rhetorical aspect of the contents.…”

The Significance of Error Analysis in Written Production: A Case Study of Ajloun National University Students

“…Finally, they are significant for learners themselves to overcome these errors in their writing . As a result, several researchers have analyzed students' written production errors in different educational context (Huang, 2001;Kim, 2001;Bataineh, 2005;Ahmadvand, 2008;Darus and Subramaniam, 2009;Al-Buainain, 2010;Tahaineh, 2010;Katiya et al, 2015).…”

“…Another research conducted by Katiya et al (2015) that identified and analyzed a corpus of Chemistry first year students' essays. The results revealed that punctuation errors , misapplication of essay construction rules , spelling errors, syntactic errors and morphological errors compromised the quality, meaning and rhetorical aspect of the contents.…”

The study of conceptual metaphors in ESAP L2 writing: range and variability

“…their level of professional competence, can be investigated in English as a foreign language learning process. Attempts in investigation of linguistic and conceptual challenges faced by ESAP learners (Katiya, Mtonjeni and Sefalane-Nkohla, 2015;Tarnopolsky and Vysselko, 2014) link the stages of professional competence development and the number of years of study in tertiary education, with a non-professional competence stage -in the first two years, and a professional competence stagein the subsequent years. As Tarnopolsky and Vysselko (2014) found, secondyear L2 learners are non-professionally competent in their specific knowledge domains since they are "still insufficiently trained in the fields of their majors to start studying majoring disciplines in the target language -thus superimposing language difficulties on content difficulties" (p. 47).…”