KOTESOL National Conference 2018
Presentation (45 minutes)
Vicente Arevalo, University of Suwon
Errors in Students’ Written Essays in Universities in Asia
Abstract
This qualitative descriptive study focuses on error analysis of selected students’ written essays from three Asian universities. A total of 83 students participated with 68 essays. Fifteen (15) essays from the University of San Agustin, 18 essays from John B. Lacson Foundation Maritime University in the Philippines and 36 essays from Univeristy of Suwon in South Korea were analyzed using Keshavarz’s (1993) linguistics taxonomy of errors. After the essays were collected, categorized, and errors were identified, these were analyzed to find the most frequent errors of these students by using the distribution of frequency. Results showed that majority of the errors done by both groups were on syntactico-morphological and few errors on lexico-semantics. Further, such errors were in the use of prepositions, articles, and part of speech, lack of concord or agreement, and spelling. It has to be noted however, that students’ errors were also brought about by their difficulty as second language learners of English. It is noticeable that the minimum frequency is related to errors in the use of relative clauses and relative pronouns and wrong use of verbs.
Biographicals
Prof. Vicente Arevalo, Ed.D. is teaching English in the University of Suwon in South Korea. He also reads his papers in both local and international conferences.
See the list of Presentations at the KOTESOL 2018 National Conference
