Title: (English) An Analysis of Grammatical Errors of Thai Undergraduate Students’

Essay Writing: A Case Study of Loei Rajabhat University Students

(Thai) การวิเคราะห์ขอ้ ผิดพลาดทางไวยากรณ์ในงานเขียนเรี ยงความของนักศึกษาไทย

กรณี ศึกษานักศึกษามหาวิทยาลัยราชภัฏเลย

1. Background of the study

In the context of education, writing becomes an important skill to learn, because it is a

part of four featured skills that must be mastered well by learners, but it is not easy to master this

skill. Although the learners are familiar with writing, there are many crucial points that make

writing not as easy as it is assumed. For example, when students are asked to write a short story,

they are expected to consider at least the content, organization, vocabulary, punctuation, and

grammar. It demands them to learn this skill deeper before producing their writings

(Wibowo, 2013). Moreover, writing for EFL students is not easy, especially when the students’

English competence is not very well developed. Writing skill is the most difficult skill for both

ESL and EFL learners (Richard and Renandya, 2002). However, since the human being has the

capability to think, the possibility to write exists (Martínez, 2005). Writing in university has been

regarded as one of the complex English skills that require thoroughly ways in order to produce a

highly rich piece of writing. Writing is also one crucial skill for academic success. It, therefore,

needs a lot of efforts on making the students write better. These efforts will be potential when

they go to the right target. However, most of the efforts are aimed at skill building and grammar

instruction. Writing in university is not only about producing a grammatically correct piece of

writing, but the writing should show a well communicative writing that can deliver what the

writer intended to convey (Qamariah, 2021).

 Being able to write effectively in L2 writing is a subset of communicative competence for

learners (Ferris, 2010), and one crucial type of knowledge needed to write successfully in

English is grammatical competence (Hyland, 2003). Studies on EFL writing have shown that the

features of grammatical errors are generally observed in texts or paragraphs produced by EFL

writers. Thai students, even at the undergraduate level, have problems producing basic sentences

of writing (Sersen, 2011), and the errors that they frequently make are grammatical errors such

as articles, tenses, verb forms, syntax and lexicon (Watcharapunyawong & Usaha, 2013; Bennui,

2008; Khaourai, 2002).

Error Analysis (EA) developed by Corder (1974) offered a fresh perspective to

researchers and teachers. Errors are considered as significant tools on the way to understand

learners’ language usage problem(s) and specify inaccurate knowledge. Crystal (2003) also

defines error analysis as a “technique for identifying, classifying and systematically interpreting

the unacceptable forms produced by someone learning a foreign language, using any of the

principles and procedures provided by linguistics”. Furthermore, Sharma (1980) stated that

“Error analysis can thus provide a strong support to remedial teaching”. There is significance in

three different ways of an analysis of errors in L2 learning (Selinker, 1969; Corder, 1981):

1) to teachers, if they understand what is hard to learn, and where the most of errors come

from, they can add more efforts in the classroom practicing it with their students,

2) to researchers. EA provides them information about the process of language learning

acquisition, the strategies that students use to learn a language,

3) to the students, making of errors serves a device they use in order to learn. If the

students understand what is hard to learn, they will pay more attention to the grammatical

structure.
 Previous studies showed that Thai undergraduate students have believed that grammar

was their most problematic area although they experienced a lot of writing difficulties overall

(Boonyarattanasoontorn, 2017). Like the studies of Nguyen (2018) and Tan and Manochphinyo

(2017), reported that they used to improve their students’ grammatical accuracy appears to

reflect that grammar is an aspect that the students need help with. Kampookaew (2020)

suggested that teachers should devote more attention to students’ grammatical errors and take

serious actions against them since the errors threaten the quality of their writings. Moreover,

without the continued efforts of both teachers and their students, the errors will occur.

Over a decade of receiving English instruction, many Thai EFL learners still experience

difficulties in writing with grammatical accuracy. So, more attempts might be called from EFL

teachers or instructors to help their students overcome the difficulties mentioned so that the

quality of their writing can be improved. Hence, the researcher has decided to conduct an error

analysis, in order to know the types of these errors and the reasons behind their continuous

phenomena year after year with different groups of the students.

2. Purposes of the study

This study aims to analyze grammatical errors of Thai undergraduate students’ essay

writings. It aims to answer the following research questions:

1. What types of grammatical errors are found in the essays written by Thai EFL

undergraduate students?

2. What are the most commonly found errors, and what might be their causes?
3. Scope of the study

As mentioned previously, this study focuses on analyzing the types of grammatical errors

committed by the third-year English major students of Loei Rajabhat University. At the

beginning, the students will be asked to write cause and effect essays. The researcher will ask the

qualified colleagues to help identify and classify the errors. Then the frequencies of errors will be

counted. The qualitative design will be conducted in order to analyze the errors.

4. Significance of the study

The researcher expects that this qualitative study will be able to give input to teachers,

who teach English, to improve their techniques and approaches in teaching writing to their

students. In addition, the teachers will be able to figure out what they should focus on teaching

writing regarding the grammatical construction. Secondly, it is also expected to the students to be

more careful to their writings. The students may be more aware when they write and understand

about a good writing should be by knowing the grammatical errors they make. The last, the

researcher hopes this research will be one of references to other researchers for the future

research.

5. Research method

In this study, a qualitative research design will be applied. Undergraduate Students’ essay

writings will be used for analyzing.

Data collection procedure

There will be three steps in this procedure namely collecting, identifying, and explaining

errors gained from collecting data. The students will be given the instruction about what they
should write. They will be asked to write a cause-and-effect essays for about 2 hours with

minimum 250 - 300 words. Then, the researcher will collect the students’ written products to

analyze. The data will be counted and classified based on types of errors and frequency of errors

made.

Data analysis

The data which will be collected, identified, and classified will then be analyzed

regarding types of errors made. The researcher will apply the Linguistic Category Taxonomy to

classify the types of errors regarding errors in grammatical construction as taken in Politzer and

Ramirez (1973).

6. Definition of terms

Errors refer to the results from Loei Rajabhat University undergraduate students’ lack of

proper grammatical knowledge in their written products.

Error analysis (EA) refers to an approach to find out types of grammatical errors are in

essays written by Loei Rajabhat University undergraduate students.

7. Conceptual framework

This study will take the pedagogical goals into consideration. When conducting an error

analysis, the researcher will follow the procedure suggested by Gass et al. (2013) involving five

steps: 1) collecting data, 2) identifying errors, 3) classifying errors, 4) quantifying errors, and 5)

analyzing sources.
Figure 1 The error analysis procedure

suggested by Gass et al. (2013)

8. References

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Corder, S. P. (1981). The significance of learner’s errors. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crystal, D. (2003). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (5th ed.). London: Blackwell.

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