Abstract
Postgraduate students are expected to show more advanced writing skill than others. However, the writer observed that they still made some errors in their thesis writing. Having reread the theses written by graduate students, Linguistic Surface Category and Surface Strategy Taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt Krashen were utilized to analyze the data. It was found that syntactic errors (89%) such as subject-verb agreement (15.42%), tenses (15.71%), redundancy (13.14%), article (7.71%), and pluralization (6.28%) are the most frequent errors occured. While lexical errors (11%) such as wrong selection of verb (5.14%) and adjective (3.14%) also still made by graduate students. The study revealed that intralingual interference still be the cause of the blunders in writing a thesis. It is hoped that the present study could initiate university students to contemplate that self-correction and self-awareness in making errors in scholarly writing are essential. Emphasizing more assignments in academic writing can be applied by the lecturers of higher education know students ability and train students to write academically. Faculty of teacher training of education should afford students with seminars and workshop of academic writing to motivate them to write and enhance their knowledge about academic writing.DOI: doi.org/10.24071/ijiet.2019.030110
Highlights
When learners learn a second or a foreign language, they tend to make errors.Errors are an inevitable part of the natural process in acquiring and learning a new language
The findings showed that the university students often use complex sentences such as adjective clauses, noun clauses and adverbial clauses
The errors were classified by Linguistic Surface Category and Surface Strategy Taxonomy proposed based on Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982)
Summary
When learners learn a second or a foreign language, they tend to make errors.Errors are an inevitable part of the natural process in acquiring and learning a new language. When learners learn a second or a foreign language, they tend to make errors. Everyone makes errors when she or he constructs a new utterance of a new language. Regarding this natural process of learning, errors cannot be seen as an offense. Pluralization and other parts of speech are often found in students’ writing that can lead university students to be unsuccessful in formulating good sentences in academic writing. The use of correct words or vocabulary in a text is the key to enhance and develop academic writing competence of foreign or second language learners other than linguistic and communicative ability (Sajid, 2016).
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