Error Analysis of Taiwanese University Students’ English Essay Writing: A Longitudinal Corpus Study

Writing is considered one of the most difficult skills in EFL/ESL. Thus, meticulous recognition and classification of students’ errors in certain contexts is a worthwhile endeavor which provides us with both diagnostic and prognostic power. Accordingly, a total of ۴۳۰ students in ۱۵ English writing classes held during ۱۲ consecutive semesters in a private university in central Taiwan were the subjects of this study. They composed ۵۷۰۳ essays which were rated and coded by the authors. Adopting and modifying the error taxonomy proposed by Zheng & Park (۲۰۱۳), the authors classified a sum of ۶۳۴۶۰ errors into four main groups with their subsequent subcategories. This study revealed that the highest problematic areas for Taiwanese university students were ‘misformation’ with ۵۱.۵۵% of the whole including errors in tenses, parts of speech, prepositions, subject/verb agreements, and run-on sentences. Then, ‘omission’ errors ranked second with ۲۱.۳۰% including errors in articles, plural suffix-s, and relative pronouns. Finally, the third and fourth error types were ‘others’ with ۱۵.۱۳% including spelling, capitalization, and wrong vocabulary, and ‘addition’ with ۱۲.۰۱% containing errors in articles, unnecessary words, and conjunctions. This study provides numerous genuine samples from the students’ compositions being annotated based on the applied error taxonomy. Thus, the data presented in this study can provide researchers with a practical framework for future studies in error analysis, as well as pedagogical implications in the field.

کلیدواژه ها:

addition ، error ، misformation ، mistake ، omission ، others ، taxonomy ، addition ، error ، misformation ، mistake ، omission ، taxonomy