Abstract
Students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are expected to master the fundamental of grammar so they can produce good essays. However, despite having learnt English at secondary or university level, students tend to make many grammatical errors in their writing. This study presents the grammatical errors made by college EFL students in their essays and the pedagogical implications viewed from those errors. This is a descriptive research with 30 second-year students who enrolled Essay Writing class as participants. Thirty written essays produced by the students were analyzed for the grammatical errors. The findings revealed that there were 368 grammatical errors found in the students’ essays. The most common one was in verb use (48%). Besides, the errors were also found in nouns (12%), prepositions (8%), determiners (8%), pronouns (8%), adverbials (6), adjectives (5%), and conjunctions (5%). If teachers do not assist students to comprehend the concept of parts of speech, and essential and nonessential clauses, these students will continue to make errors in their more advanced writing. The findings may have useful pedagogical implications for English language teachers, syllabus designers, and test developers. Understanding students’ difficulties and providing appropriate grammar instructions are the keys to teach grammar.
Highlights
Grammatical error is one of the problems faced by students in writing
The grammatical errors committed by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in essay writing Below is the analysis result in form of the number of errors committed by the students based on the error types
It can be seen that the most frequent grammatical error was in verb use as it existed 178 times or 48% in the students’ essays
Summary
Grammatical error is one of the problems faced by students in writing. Previous studies strongly recommend that the most beneficial approach of facilitating learners’ command of grammar in writing is to employ students’ writing as the starting point for discussing grammatical concepts (Calkins, 1980; DiStefano & Killion, 1984; Harris, 1962 in Hanganu, 2015). Teachers can facilitate grammar instruction that directs students in their efforts to recognize and correct errors in usage (Chin, 2000). The teacher who sees that many students are writing sentences containing misplaced modifiers can present a mini-lesson on this concept, using examples from student writing. The teacher can instruct the students to exchange their drafts with their peers for editing purposes. Integrating grammar instruction into the revising and editing process assists
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