Abstract
Errors in writing are unavoidable while students are trying to develop their writing skills. There have been several studies on identifying writing problems or errors in students’ writing. It is believed that identifying students’ written tasks is an effective tool to explore the difficulties involved in learning language. This helps teachers’ awareness of the serious problems which occur in students’ writing and allows them to pay closer attention to their errors. The aim of the present research study is to pinpoint writing errors in English abstracts written by Thai undergraduate students. Forty abstracts of research projects were collected and analysed. The error analysis was conducted at the sentence level, word level, and mechanics aspect. The five most frequent error types ranking from the most frequent to least frequent were word choice, preposition, sentence construction, singular or plural forms and quotation marks. The findings of the present study have shed light on the students’ writing ability and give an insight into what the problems students face when writing their abstracts. Also, the errors found in the abstracts in the present study have pedagogical implications concerning English language learning, particularly with writing courses. The findings will be helpful for teachers to develop teaching materials to assist their students from committing errors when writing English abstracts and to improve academic writing skills.
Highlights
In has been observed that developing English writing skills is challenging for non-native English speakers and teaching such skills are difficult on part of the teachers (Heaton, 1990; Richards & Renandya, 2002)
The corpus of the present study was 40 research project abstracts written in English by 4th year students in “English for International Communication (EIC)” program
An Error Analysis of Research Project Abstracts Written by Thai Undergraduate Students was quite limited since the program was a new program and only the availability and accessibility abstracts were included in the study
Summary
In has been observed that developing English writing skills is challenging for non-native English speakers and teaching such skills are difficult on part of the teachers (Heaton, 1990; Richards & Renandya, 2002). Jogthong (2001) asserted that in countries where English is not the mother tongue, most learners struggle when writing academic texts even if they can communicate well. These problems with writing are caused by the complex nature of the writing skill which needs considerable time and effort to solve. There are several factors affecting ESL/EFL students in writing such as attitudes, writing strategies, educational background, prior experiences, and linguistic knowledge. All these factors influence non-native learners when writing in English (Thongrin, 2000)
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