Revisiting the Linguistic Errors in the Writing of the Students Majoring in English

Abstract

Abstract-The basic writing skills ability of the students newly admitted to the English Department was still poor in terms of the grammatical aspect, choice and use of words, and phrase construction. This study reexamined the linguistic errors of the English Department students' writing. A total of 67 writing papers were randomly selected out of 125 writings of the 6th semester English Department students which were written in class in a 60-minute time. Their writings were then entered into word processing to identify the types of errors using the Linguistic Category Taxonomy. They were grouped into verb tenses, verb forms, modal auxiliary, sentence structure, word order, connectors, passive construction, subject-verb agreement, determiners, number, mechanics, dictions, preposition, and unclear ideas. Of 1080 sentences contained in students' writings, only 299 sentences (27.69%) were grammatically correct. The most types of errors found were sentence structure (20.71%), verb tense (19.64%) and verb form (15.64%). Other categories were less than 10%. Of these errors, 62.29% are attributable to intra-lingual transfer and 37.71% to inter-lingual transfer errors. These findings become the basis for designing and developing materials and strategies for writing course at the second years. The finding of this study may provide some guideline for the teachers in writing and grammar courses.

Students Critical-Creative Thinking Skill: A Multivariate Analysis of Experiments and Gender

“…In the review of the CrTS, it is apparent that all the subject groups in each content have a significance value of less than 0.05, with MSLAM providing more effect to CrTS than HOTs Lab. When the results were reviewed, this study obtained the average error rate for CvTS 7.52% and CrTS 7.03% which is relatively small for the research group socio-scientific (Nuijten et al, 2016;Rahman et al, 2017;Vázquez-Cano et al, 2017). Therefore, it can be concluded that the addition of HOT Lab model's several steps has succeeded in increasing students CvTS and CrTS simultaneously.…”

“…These findings have a relatively high level of accuracy based on the error value that provide a relatively small error value of 7.52% and 7.03% for the experimental models of CvTS, and CrTS. Meanwhile, using the gender model, it produced 7.87% and 8.81% for CvTS, and CrTS, with 7.53% and 7.01 for the simultaneous models of experiment and gender to CvTS, and CrTS (Nuijten et al, 2016;Rahman et al, 2017;Vázquez-Cano et al, 2017). Therefore, in conclusion, MSLAM has the ability to adapt two thinking skills at once.…”

Some Effects of Explicit Grammar Instruction and Syntactic Priming on Students’ Written Language Production

“…Therefore, they are expected to have sufficient grammatical knowledge and skills when they already complete the four semester courses. However, a recent study [8] reported that the students majoring in English did not apply correctly the grammatical items that they had learned in four consecutive courses when they were assigned to write. Among the most frequently grammatical errors commited by the students in their writing are verb tenses, sentences structure, subject-verb agreement, word order, pepositions, and determiners.…”