Abstract
This paper examines the different types of writing errors performed by 16 international postgraduate students undertaking an intensive English course at a public university in Malaysia. It was mandatory for international postgraduate students who obtained less than IELTS Band 6 to undertake an Intensive English Course (IEC) offered by the University, prior to entering their respective faculties’ academic programs. The students were required to write a 3-5 page term paper assignment on a topic related to their field of study. Mixed methodology approach was employed to examine and analyze corpus of students’ term papers. The errors in the term papers were identified and classified accordingly. The results of the study revealed that four most common English language errors committed by the participants were sentence structure, articles, punctuation and capitalization. This study also shed light on the manner in which students assumed the rules of English to that of their native language. Such insight is useful for both instructors and students because it provides significant information on the building blocks experienced by English language learners in academic writing.
Highlights
Writing in English is accounted as a complex process for English as a foreign language learners and committing errors in writing are found as an inevitable part of language learners’ writing. Ellis (1997) pointed out to the lack of fossilization of learners’ grammar in first language acquisition, rather its’ importance in second language acquisition. Corder (1967) considered errors as the evidence of the learners’ inherent syllabus which demonstrated how first and second language learners advance an independent system of language
This paper examines the different types of writing errors performed by 16 international postgraduate students undertaking an intensive English course at a public university in Malaysia
It was mandatory for international postgraduate students who obtained less than IELTS Band 6 to undertake an Intensive English Course (IEC) offered by the University, prior to entering their respective faculties’ academic programs
Summary
Writing in English is accounted as a complex process for English as a foreign language learners and committing errors in writing are found as an inevitable part of language learners’ writing. Ellis (1997) pointed out to the lack of fossilization of learners’ grammar in first language acquisition, rather its’ importance in second language acquisition. Corder (1967) considered errors as the evidence of the learners’ inherent syllabus which demonstrated how first and second language learners advance an independent system of language. Corder (1967) further noted that classifying the errors committed by the learners helps the researchers to learn a great deal about the second language acquisition process through identifying the strategies that language learners employ. The analysis of language learners’ grammatical knowledge enables the language teachers and instructors to predict and conquer problems of errors encountered in the process of language learning. He regarded the functions of errors are indispensable since errors are considered as a device the learners use in order to learn
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