An Analysis of Errors in English Essays Written by Thai Non-English Major Students

Abstract

Writing is one of the vital skills for EFL learners. However, they still face some difficulties while processing a task. The present study aimed to analyze the errors that occurred on sixty English essays made by Thai University non-English major students who enrolled in the fundamental English course. The Surface Strategy Taxonomy (Dulay, Burt, & Krashen, 1982) was adopted to explore the errors of omission, addition, misformation, and misordering together with those that were excluded in the taxonomy. According to the framework of Surface Strategy Taxonomy, the findings revealed the most common errors involving omission of articles, followed by the addition of the preposition, the omission of the preposition, the omission of the subject, and misformation of subject pronoun, respectively. Then, according to the errors which were out of the stated taxonomy, the errors in subject-verb agreement were the highest detected error, followed by tense errors, ambiguous sentences, a direct translation from L1 to L2, misformation of object pronoun, misformation of using an adjective as the main verb, the addition of verb to be, and addition of conjunction, respectively. By investigating the errors in foreign language writing, the results would trigger foreign language learners to aware of the error of English writing that might occur. And the benefit also goes to the pedagogy in developing the teaching materials together with teaching strategies.