An Analysis of Grammatical Errors Made by Thai EFL University Students in an EAP writing Class: Issues and Recommendations

Abstract

Grammatical errors are major concerns for many teachers and students. The first step in tackling these errors is to investigate what kinds of grammatical errors students make and how frequently they occur so that remedies can be sought. This study thus set out to analyze the essays written by Thai EFL students. The data used for analysis were 58 essays (24,445 words) produced by 29 second-year students enrolled in an EAP writing class at a public university in Thailand. Through the analysis, 1,199 errors were found. The errors were classified into ten types, and errors on nouns, articles, verbs, word classes, and prepositions were the most frequently found errors, constituting 84.07% of all the errors identified. This study also further divided the ten types of errors into 49 subtypes. This thorough and in-depth error classification revealed that wrong use of singular and plural nouns, omission of the article ‘the’, and subject-verb disagreements were the most prevalent grammatical errors committed by the Thai EFL students in this study. Alarmingly, the results showed that Thai EFL students still struggle with grammatical accuracy when they write. Although these grammatical errors may not completely obscure the meanings of students’ writing, the worrying point is their presence or prevalence can significantly undermine its quality and prevent it from reaching publishable quality. To address this issue, more attempts need to be made on the part of Thai EFL teachers. Therefore, this paper also provides recommendations for how to assist students in fixing thesecommonly made grammatical errors.