Error Analysis of English Writing in Final Year Projects in Malaysia: The Case of IIUM

Abstract

This study conducted an Error Analysis (EA) on written dissertations by undergraduates from the English Language and Literature (BENL) department at International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). Despite the abundance of research on EA conducted with multiple samples and backgrounds, only a few studies concerning EA can be found and accessed in a Malaysian context. Thus, this paper aims to find the most common errors committed by undergraduates in Malaysia, focusing on their theses that adhered strictly to academic writing. Using Stephen Pit Corder's EA framework, a qualitative approach was employed to find the errors in the written samples. Additionally, this research synthesised the results of the Lunsford & Connors' study in 1988 with several studies on the Malaysian context that were compared and contrasted with findings from the interview session with lecturers from the BENL department to find the most common errors in writing among Malaysians. This paper's results demonstrate that the most common errors from IIUM undergraduates are word choice, punctuation, prepositions, plurality and singularity, verbs, articles, pronoun, ambiguity, adverbs, and subject-verb agreement. Similar to the synthesis, word choice remains the most highlighted classification of errors. In contrast, it is revealed that subject-verb agreement (SVA) is not the most frequent error. One possible justification for this finding is accessible online grammar checkers that revise students' writing with basic grammar rules. Therefore, this paper has contributed to Error Analysis in theses to benefit language learners, both learners and teachers and researchers interested in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) field in Malaysia.