commonerrorsinwrittenenglishessays-plg 501 5.pdf

8/10/2019 commonerrorsinwrittenenglishessays-plg 501 5.pdf

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Source :European Journal of Social SciencesVolume 10,Number 2 (2009)

Done by :SAADIYAH DARUS & KHOR HEI CHINGSchool of Language Studies and LinguisticsFaculty of Social Sciences and Humanities

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

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Educational system in Malaysiabased on RazakReport (1956)

Malaysian educational structurea) Primary education6 years

b) Secondary education5 yearsc) Sixth Form education2 years

Prior to Razak Report, medium of instructiona) National schoolMalay

b) National type (Chinese & Tamil)native languageEnglish & Malaycompulsory subjects to learn

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Secondary level of educationa) Lower secondary level- - 3 years (Form 1 - Form 3)b) Upper secondary level- - 2 years (Form 4 & Form 5)

Secondary level - medium of instruction is Malay

Vernacular students will have to endure effects fromthe changes of medium of instruction

Chinese students from vernacular schoolEnglishand Malay are taught in primary level as onesubject respectively

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When they enter Form Oneall subjects are taught

in Malay except for English and Mandarin subjectsEnglish has become L2 in Malaysia

From being the medium of instruction in schoolssince pre-independence, it has now become acompulsory subject that students need to take(Asmah, 1997)

Chitravelu et al. (2004:12) talk about the position ofEnglish as an L2 and its importance to enableMalaysians to engage meaningfully in local and

international trade and commerceThus, students need to be proficient in English andbeing able to write well in English is definitely anadvantage for their future

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Out of the four skills, writing is the most complexaspect but it is a crucial skill for students to learn

Students who have the ability and competency in

writing in English will be able to express themselveseffectively

Moreover, they will have more privilege whenapplying for any job compared to other students

especially in private sectors and companies thatare involved at international level

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The Form One Chinese students in vernacularschools need to master three languagestheirnative language, Malay and English

Out of these three languages, English is neglectedand not being paid attention to

They are not very much exposed to English and donot have sufficient training in the language

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To investigate errors in essays written in English byForm One Chinese students in a public school inPerak

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What are the four most common errors in theirwritten English essays?

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There can be a huge difference between Englishwriting by native speakers (NS) and English writingby English as a second language (ESL) learners

ESL learners have more than one language whilethey are composing as compared to NS

Since they have more than one language in hand,it brings more problems

ESL learners tend to switch those languagesinteractively, causing some confusion in thestructure and meaning

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As several studies have reported,

a) L2 writers use their L1 to plan their writing for text

generation (Cumming, 1989; Jones & Tetroe,1987),

b) Transfer their L1 knowledge to L2 writing contexts

(Edelsky, 1982; Friedlander, 1990; Lay, 1982), and

c) Develop ideas and produce text content and

organization (Lay, 1982)

In short, L2 writers always make use of their L1 first,

while composing in the L2 before translating it to L2This shows that L1 influence the L2 writer in theirprocess of writing in L2 and the influences can bepositive or negative

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PARTICIPANTS

70 students from two Form One classes in aselected public school in Perak

They came from Chinese vernacular schools withMandarin as the main language of instruction

They scored on average a grade B or C in theirUjian Penilaian Sekolah Rendah (UPSR) and other

monthly English tests

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Errors in language learners performance includingwriting process have long become the subject of

interest among teachers, linguists and syllabusplanners

According to Corder (1967), error can be definedas a systematic, consistent deviance characteristic

of the learners linguistic system at a given stage oflearning

Meanwhile, Dulay et al. (1982) define error as :the flawed side of the learners speech or writing

They are those parts of conversation or compositionthat deviates from selected norm of maturelanguage performance. (Dulay et al., 1982: 138)

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WRITING SAMPLE

Following Halliday and Hassan (1976) who statedthat writing allows writers to demonstrate their ability

to construct a string of well-connected sentencesthat are grammatically and logically correct, thestudents were asked to write a short essay

The writing sample for the study - 70 essays written in

English by these 70 students

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INSTRUMENT

In order to identify the errors, an error classificationscheme developed by Darus et al. (2007) was

adapted in this studyIt consists of 18 types of errors as follows :

a) Tenses

b) Articles

c) Subject verb agreement

d) Other agreement errors

e) Infinitive

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f) Gerunds

g) Pronouns

h) Possessive and attributive structuresi) Word order

j) Incomplete structures

k) Negative constructions

l) Lexical categories (preposition)

m) Other lexical categories

n) Mechanics

o) Word choice

p) Word form

q) Verb to be

r) Malaysian typical words

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Markin 3.1 software (Holmes, 1996-2004) was used inthe process of identifying the errors in the studentsessays

The software was chosen because it enabledresearchers to obtain accurate classification andstatistical analysis of errors

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RESEARCH PROCEDURE

Students were asked to write a short essay (in therange of 80300 words)

The topic of the essay was My Family

They were given one week to write their essaysbefore researchers collected them for text analysis

Essays collected were typed so that they werecomputer readable

The errors of each essay were identified usingMarkin 3.1 software based on the error classificationScheme

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Table 1


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Table 1 shows the total number of errors for eachcategory of grammatical errors as well as itspercentage and mean value

10,147 words were analyzed that consist ofapproximately 145 words for each essay

The results of the mean values show that fourcommon errors are mechanics (2.73), tense (1.73),

preposition (1.29) and subject-verb agreement(1.24)

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4 COMMONERRORS

Mechanics

Tenses

Preposition Subject-Verb Agreement


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19.1% of total number of errors

In the area of spelling, punctuation andcapitalization

Spellingread vs rid (mainly due to phoneticsperception)

Punctuationcommas (,)

a) I feel happy to have a lovely family,and I hope

my family will always happyb) There are my father, mother *eldest sister and

me

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Capitalization

a) My mom occupation is a House Wife

b) My brother is a Form two student

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12.1 % of total number of errors

English verbs change according to aspect of time(present, past, future and continuous tense)

For example :

I goto the market Saya pergike pasar

I will goto the market Saya akanpergike pasar

I wentto the market Saya telah pergike pasarI am goingto themarket

Saya sedang pergike pasar

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The verb pergi in the sentences did not indicatetime

Time was shown separately by auxiliary verb andparticles such as akan, telah, sedang

- Difficult for students to understand the idea of

tense usage

Errors identified :

a) Every night we watchingTV [watch]b) I studyin SMJK Yuk Chong [am studying]

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9.0 % of total number of errors

Errors includes omissions, additions and wrongselections

For example - Chinese and Malay preposition direfers to in, at and on in English

Dia bekerja diKualaLumpur

He works inKuala Lumpur

Salmah bekerja dipejabat pos

Salmah works atthe postoffice

Dia letakkan buku itu diatas meja

He puts the book onthetable

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Therefore students were incapable of choosing thecorrect prepositions when more than one Englishprepositions corresponds to a single Chinese orMalay prepositions

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8.7% of total number of errors

Errors includes difficulties in distinguishing the verbis or was with are or were

Confuse with some nouns such as people orhomework

I goto school Saya pergike sekolah

She goesto school Dia pergike sekolah

They goto school Mereka pergike sekolah

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Example :

a) My family havefive members [has]

b) There is five family members in my house [are]

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Errors are caused by :

1) Interference of L1

2) Inadequate understanding of grammatical rules

of EnglishThis study shows that the four most common errorsmade by the Chinese students are mechanics ofwriting, tenses, preposition and subject-verb

agreementIn general, the finding of this study shows that theChinese students were very much influenced by theL1 in their process of learning English

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Suggestions :

1) Teacher should emphasize on how the

concepts are handled in English, Malay and

Chinese2) Teachers should highlight certain rules in L1 and

Malay that are inappropriate to be used when

they write in English

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