139
Bows 408
19904 6B
An Error Analysis of English Writing
Through Korean College Students’ English
Compositions
Cha Kyung-Whan
(Chung-Ang University)
Need for the Study
This paper attempted to facilitate the process of teaching writing in
English by studying the phonomenon of “errors.” Systematic analysis of
errors can provide useful insights into the processes of language acquisi-
tion in that all language learners produce errors when they learn,
Because errors are signals that actual learning is taking place, they can
indicate students’ progress and success in language learning(Corder,
1967 ; Zydatiss, 1974; Lange, 1977; Lantolf, 1977; Brown, 1987).
Therefore, studying students’ errors has immediate practical applications
for foreign language teachers. It enables the teacher to decide whether he
must devote more time to the item he has been working on (Corder,
1973 : 265 ; Dulay, Burt and Krashen, 1982 : 150).
Much of what has been published on error correction in writing is
speculative, and needs to be validated by a great deal of empirical
experimentation (Hendrickson, 1980 : 156) . Research is needed to deter-
mine which errors occur most frequently, The results of this research
could serve as a basis for building hierachies of language learning fea-
tures ; these hierachies would have multiple appications including the
establishment of priorities for correcting errors selectively and systemat-
% This research
made possible by Chung-Ang University’s 1989 Research Fund 140 Cha Kyung-whan
ically (Hendrickson, 1980 : 161).
Purpose of the Study
The overall goal of this study was three-fold! 1) to gather specific
information aborut what kinds of errors Korean college students make in
their English compositions ; 2) to find out the trend of errors(whether the
number of errors would increase, decrease, or remain unchanged during
the course of their essay-writing exercises) in the course of instruction ;
3) to find out whether an error-correction oriented instruction had a
positive effect on the development of the students’ proficiency in writing.
Error analysis is a technique applied in analyzing problem areas stu-
dents have by analyzing misuses, In this study, the researcher has
focused on error taxonomies that classify errors according to some
observable surface feature of the error itself, without reference to its
underlying cause or source, He has not undertaken the explanation of
errors ; this study is not a contrastive analysis which describes one source
in detail.
The language teacher who knows the types of students’ error is much
better equipped to deal with them, both in terms of prevention and
correction, than the one who does not. This study was done to under-
stand what errors occur in order to use that knowledge to better under-
stand and improve the teaching of writing in English.
The following 11 areas were the major concerns of this study :
1. Word Form(Hereinafter WF)—Verb Tense, Singular/Plural,
Count/Non-count, Verb Forms (Subject-Verb Agreement), Adjec-
tive Forms
2. Word Order /Misordering(Hereinater WO) —Subject/Verb Word
order, Inverted Word Order
3, Article(ART) — (In) Definite Article, Article Omission
4, Word Choice(WC) —Wrong word choice
5, Preposition(PREP) —Prepositional Errors An Error Analysis of English Writing Through 141
Korean College Students’ English Compositions
. Capitalization(CAP}
. Punctuation(PUN} —Comma, Apostophe, Colon, Hyphen
. Spelling (SP)
. Paragraphing(P)
10. Omitted or Added Words(OW)
11. Number of Sentences (NS) ~ Number of sentences in their composi-
Cuore
tions
Subject
The research subjects were 46 students who took a “Beginning English
Writing” course for the spring semester of 1989 in the Department of
English Education at Chung-Ang University, Seoul. However, six
seniors left the class one and a half months prior to end of the class due
to their student-teaching period. Thus in this analysis, only 40 samplings
were involved, Of the 40, 33 students were sophomores, and 7 students
were juniors or seniors in other departments, None of the students had
taken any English writing courses before,
Data Collection
The error data were collected by asking the students to write composi-
tions in English on topics of their choice. The subjects wrote eight essay
-type compositions for a logitudinal study of a semester, The students
spent about 35-40 minutes for an essay : 5 minutes for organization of the
essay, 25-30 minutes for writing, and 5 minutes for proofreading and
rewriting. While they wrote, they were allowed to utilize Korean-Eng-
lish and/or English-Korean dictionaries, and had three topics to choose
from for each essay they wrote
Beginning each session, the researcher distributed newspaper articles,
magazine articles, or held a discussion session so as to control the
sampling topic area, and to give logical ideas on the topic they would 142 ‘Che Kyung-whan
write about, Examples of the topics given were as follows : Air Pollu-
tion, My University Life, What did you Do Last Weekend, My Favorite
Sport, An Essay about Myself, Married Couples, Qualities of a Good
Husband and Wife, Mother’s Love, Forming a Friendship, etc. In the
early part of the semester, he presented the subjects with a genuine
wirtten text which had been selected because it illustrated a particular
aspect or skill of written English ; for example, English rhetorical pat-
terns, paragraph development, topic sentences, etc
The researcher utilized two reference books in his class. One was
Arnaudet and Barrett’s(1981) Paragraph Development : A Guide for
Students of English as a Second Language which introduced basic English
writing patterns and organizations to the subjects, Most university
departments of English in Korea offer English writing courses ; however,
those are most often classes of translation or sentence-level writing. This
book : however, focuses on the physical paragraph as an basic unit of
composition common to most forms of academic, business, professional,
and general-purpose writing(Arnaudet and Barrett, 1981 : ix-Preface} .
The other was Crowell’s (1987) Index to Modern English which helped the
students manipulate the grammatical or mechanical aspects of English
writing.
Each of the submitted essays was graded according to their grammati-
cal and organizational levels. The researcher’s main concern was about
the samplings’ grammatical aspects since the course level was beginning
In this study, the scale was from 5 [i.e., contained minor errors], to 4,
or 3[indicating that the essay contained many errors] points, Every one
of their errors was marked by abbreviated letters, and registered on his
or her “Composition Evalution Sheet" so that both the researcher and the
student could indentify his/her kind and number of errors.
In a carefully designed experiment, Lalande (1982) found that stu-
dents who used an error code when revising their compositions made
significantly greater gains than a group whose compositions were
corrected directly by the instructor (Lalande, 1982 : Robb, Ross, and Shortreed, 1986 : 84) .
Error charts are useful not only for diagnostic purpose, but also for
developing individualized instructional materials, for building a hiera-
chy of error correction priorities, and learning more about the process
of second language acquisition (Hendrickson, 1980 : 164; Robb, Ross
and Shortreed. 1986 : 84).
The researcher selected some of the students’ common mistakes, and
discussed them in class. In addition, he had the students look up those
grammatical points in Crowell’s reference book, The students rewrote
their essays bases upon the researcher's error-checking marks. The
rewritten essay was not collected because their errors had been marked
The researcher's concern was what kinds of grammatical mistakes in
writing were the most common ones made by these Korean college
students, After the fifth composition, the researcher counselled them
about their common errors based upon thieir composition evaluation
sheets, Three more essays were written after the individual sessions,
Should Learner Errors be Corrected ?
There is some controversy on whether student errors should be correct-
ed in some sort of systemetic manner or not. No current standards exist
on when, which, or how student errors should be corrected. Some
experts contend that teachers should correct all errors immediately, In
addition, a recent survey on college students’ attitudes toward error
(conversation error] correction reveals that the students not only want to
be corrected, but also wish to be corrected more than teachers feel they
should be (Cathcart and Olsen, 1976 ; Hendrickson, 1980: 157).
Error correction is especially useful to adult second language
learners because it helps them learn the exact environment in which to
apply rules and discover the precise semantic range of lexical items
(Krashen and Seliger, 1975 : Hendrickson, 1980 : 157) 144 Cha Kyung-whan
On the other hand, too many corrections may not be recommendable.
Selective feedback may be more effective than systematic feedback.
This positive perspective toward second language errors is based
partly upon analogy to the fact that children everywhere produce
numerous errors while acquiring their first language —errors that
their parents expect and accept as a natural and necessary part of
child developnent. Many language educators propose that foreign
language teachers also should expect many errors from their students,
and should accept those errors as a natural phonomenon integral to
the process of learning a second language. When teachers tolerate
some student errors, students often feel more confident about using
the target language than if all their errors are corrected (Hendrick-
son, 1980 : 155) .
Most Korean college students make mistakes in writing due to lack of
writing exercises, They made writing mistakes/errors that they knew
perfectly well in reading contexts. In that sense, drawing the students’
attention to every error they produce in their written compositions not
only wastes time, but also provides no guarantee that they will learn
from their mistakes, as evidenced by similar errors that may reappear on
their subsequent written work (George, 1972 } Hendrickson, 1980 : 158).
Limitations of Error Analysis
There is a danger in too much attention to learners’ errors in that
production errors are only a subset of the overall performance of the
learner.
“While the diminishing of errors is an important criterion for
increasing language proficiency, the ultimate goal of second language
learning is the attainment of communicative fluency in a language”
(Brown, 1987 : 171).
In addition, error analysis fails to account for the strategy of avoid- Rovean Cologe Studente"Entiah Competes 145
ance — students may avoid a particular word, or structure, so as not to
have it be detected and marked as an error, “The absence of error
therefore does not necessarily reflect nativelike competence since
learners may be avoiding the very structures that pose difficulty for
them” (Brown, 1987 : 172).
Problems
There is no clear-cut distinction between ‘mistakes’ and ‘errors’, but
here are two very different phenomena. “A mistake refers to a perfor-
mance error that is either a random guess or a slip, in that it is a failure
to utilize a known system correctly.” Whereas, “An error is a noticeable
deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflecting the
interlanguage competence of the learner” (Corder, 1967 : 166 ; Sridhar,
1980 : 105 ; Brown, 1987: 170}. In this study, both errors and mistakes
were included in the sample corpus.
In labelling the sample corpus, the researcher has not dealt with
taxonomic classification into detailed categories, e.g., in the case of
PREP, the researcher didn’t subcategorize kinds of prepositional errors
made since it was introductory diagnostic research,
Result
A total of 40 students made a grand total of 2567 errors or mistakes.
The following tables consist of numbers and percentages of errors the
researcher noted.
Summary of Error Count for WF....,...... 804‘31, 329%)
(Increase) .....7 Students
D(Decrease} .....9 Students
C (Continual) . ..24 Students
Table 1 shows that the correction of students’ compositions has no
significant effect on reducing WF errors, in that 60 percent (24 students) 146 Cha Kyung-whan
of the subjects have made the mistakes continually.
1. Examples of WF
l-a) Verb Tense
x My brother did not remember what I faught him the day before
yesterday, (had taught)
x I have seen a good film yesterday. (saw)
x You will be sorry to miss the movie, (have missed)
1-b) Singular/Plural
% I knew that they were a serious-minded person, (a->Z, persons)
[*Z" indicates omission, ]
%* A number of members has resigned. (have)
NOTE, The word ‘number’ may be either singular or plural, It is
used with countable things. If it is preceded by ‘a’ in reference to
quantity, it is plural (Crowell, 1987 : 349)
1-c) Count/Non-count
% I received several mails today, (pieces of mail)
* Ihave some homeworks to do today, (homework)
1-d) Verb Forms(including Subject-Verb Agreement)
% We Koreans have to work hard because our conutry is lack of of
natural resources, (lacks) (Kosofsky, 1987 : 84)
% She often buy clothes (buys)
* A basket of apples ave in the car. (is)
1-e) Adjective Forms
* My friend, Young-soo is a friend man, (friendly)
* The plane flew highly in the sky, (high)
& Every one of the two boys was wrong, (Each)
Summary of Error Count for WO....,..... 79(3.07%)
I. 2 Students.
D.. . 3 Students.
Cc... ...10 Students
Ul. . .25 Students An Error Analysis of English Writing Through
Korean College Students’ English Compositions 7
“U" indicates no mistakes, or can’t be determined whether it is in the
trend of increasing, decreasing, or continuation.
2, Examples of WO
Q-a) $-V Word Order
* Why you were absent last Friday? (were you)
*& Never / have heard of such a thing. {have I}
% He asked me what games did / play, (I played)
% I don’t know what és that, (that is}
2-b) Inverted Word Order
% I will see you about at 2 o'clock this afternoon. (at about/about)
* He is all the time late. — »He is late all the time
Summary of Error Count for ART............ 554 (21.58%)
T...........4, Students
D.... -11 Students
C..
3. Examples of ART
3-a) Definite Article
x In Korea, the school starts in March, (Z)
.25 Students
* Do you prefer city to country. (the city, the country)
3-b) Indefinite Article
x T've heard about az woman who saved her child from a railraod
accident. (a)
%& She forgot small part of her talk. (a small)
* When I was in the army, 1 was @ MP (military police) . (an)
3-c) Article Omission
* This is study of the past. (the study)
Summary of Error Count for WC......... 276 (10.75%) 148 “Cha Kyung-whan
4, Examples of WC
% How do you think about it ? (What)
* The temperature was hot today. (high)
* Please teach me the way to Chung-Ang University. (show/tell)
* Love is not the only element for their successful marriage life.
(married)
* I was at the movie when you called, (movies)
NOTE, Movie is used to refer to a motion-picture film, The movies
is used to refer to a motion-picture theater or to the motion-picture
industry (Crowell, 1987 : 288) .
»* I don't think all Korean hospitals are unkind. (doctors)
%* Until now, they have no telephone in their house.-+They don’t
have a telephone in their house yet,
NOTE. In English, the word ‘Until’ represents a point of change.
“Until designates a point in time when a circumstance or situation
becomes different (Kosofsky, 1987 : 278) .
Summary of Error Count for PREP........... 163(6.34%)
5. Examples of PREP
* She approached fo the factory at 6, (Z}
* Weather conditions influence on agricultural production. (Z)
* I live af an apartment at the third floor. (in, on)
* He is very careful for his health, (of)
* My parents have lived together during 22 years. (for)
NOTE, ‘During’ says when something happen ; for’ says how long it
lasts . An Error Analysis of English Writing Through 149
Korean College Students” English Compositions
Summary of Error Count for CAP......,.. 139 (5.41%)
6. Examples of CAP
* | like Spring the best. (spring)
* He asked, “ave you coming ? “(Are)
% I met my wife two years ago at christmas, (Christmas)
Summary of Error Count for PUN...... «207 (8.06%)
I,
7, Examples of PUN
7-a) Comma
* You can either go, or stay.(’ > Z)
* Have you seen my new car which I bought last week ? (car, )
7-b) Apostrophe
4 Whenever my dog sees me, it wags it’s tail. (its)
* There were four 90s in the score. (90's)
% Personal computers are popular in the 1980's. (1980s)
7-c) Clolon
* Dear Mr, Kim ; (Kim: /Kim,)
% There are four seasons in a year ; spring, summer, fall and winter.
Go)
7-d} Hyphen
* The leader was not always well-known. (well known)
* We were almost exhausted wh-en we reached the top of the
mountain, (when)
NOTE. Words cannot be divided arbitrarily but only between syllables. 150 Cha Kyung-whan
Summary of Error Count for SP 132(5.14%)
8. Examples of Spelling-Words Frequently Misspelled
colum-—column, retoric>rhetoric, abbribiate-»abbreviate, acustom—
accustom, etc
Crowell provides a list of 430 words most commonly misspelled in
English compositions, see his book pages 357-360.
Summary of Error Count for P............32(1.24%)
During the early part of the semester, students used to make paragra-
phing mistakes due to their lack of knowlwdge on English paragraph (a
group of sentences which develop one central idea) development.
Summary of Error Count for OW........ 181(7.05%)
L
D,
c.
U
10. Examples of OW
* I have interested in English very much, so I--- (have been)
* I want draw it(to draw)
* I am sorry to be one of the same citizens of Seoul. (Z)
* My name was given by my father twenty six years ago, just before
I was not born, (Z} An Error Analysis of English Writing Through
Korean College Students’ English Compositions
* He doesn’t knows my name, (know)
Omission/ Addition errors are charaterized by the absence/pres-
ence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance
respectively.
11, Other Mistakes
%* Beacuse I was ill. I had te stay home yesterday, (Because I was
ill, I had to stay home yesterday. /I had to stay home yesterday
because I was ill.)
* My father is athletic and « scholar. (scholarly)
NOTE. Make the menbers of a parallelism the same kind of syntactic
unit (Crowell, 1987 : 249).
% The snow was very heavy, and I am sure | don't like rain, >The
snow was very heavy. I should also add that I don’t like rain.
NOTE, /f two or more thoughts are to be joined by coordinate
conjunctions, they should be velated (Berry, 1971: 137).
The results of the 10 items of errors are shown here in the order of
decreasing frequency as follows: WF (31.32%) > ART :21,58%) >
WC (10.75% > Pun (8.06%) -> OW (7.05%) -+ PREP :6.34%) ~ SP
(5.41%) - WO (3.07%) +P 11.2
allowed to use dictionaries while they wrote, the SP percentage was still
5.15%, In other words, if they hadn't utilized dictionaries, they would
have made more spelling errors
In addition, the composition evaluation sheet revealed that the students
had utilized 11 to 12 sentences (11,66 sentences on average) in each of
their compositions in English, As the number of writing experiences
961. Although the students were
grew, only 2 students(5%) increased the number of sentences in their
compositions, whereas the majority of the students, 24:60), slightly
decreased the number of sentences, and 14(35%) students neither in-
creased nor decreased their sentence use. The researcher infers from the
results above that his correction-oriented instruction intimidated the
subjects into using less challenging structures so as to avoid the chance of 152 Cha Kyung-whan
making more mistakes as they increased their number of sentences and
wrote longer compositions, In other words, the correction-oriented
writing instruction might hinder the students’ development of proficiency
because this practice could destroy their confidence and force them to
expend so much effort on details that lose the overall ability to use
language (Walker, 1973 : 103) .
Conelusions
Learners’ errors definitely should be corrected ; however, the English
teacher should not attempt to correct all of the students’ errors in writing
from the first class, Both proficiency and accuracy are equally important
in the use of language. However, the researcher noted that proficiency
should come before accuracy, stressing the importance of rich, meaning-
ful input, plus frequent opportuities to paricipate in authentic discourse in
writing. Thus language teachers should reject the obsessive concern with
error avoidance, and should hold that producing errors is a natural and
necessary phonomenon in language learning (Lange, 1977 ; Lantolf,
1977: Terrell, 1977 ; Handrickson, 1980). Foreign language educators
generally agree that tolerating errors helps learners communicate both in
speech and writing more confidently in a foreign language, Following are
the major conclusions of the study :
1. Korean college students most commonly make mistakes/errors in
WF (31.32%), ART (21.58%), and WC(10.75%) . The results indicated
that further investigation is needed on the determination of WF, ART,
WC errors’ origins as the number of writing exeriences increased. The
researcher tentatively assumes the errors as interference errors and/or
developmental errors, Interference errors refer to those caused by the
influence of the students’ mother tongue, Korean, on their production of
English in those areas presumably where the two languages clearly
differ, On the other hand, the developmental errors are completely
independent of the Korean language but are rather the making of false
hypotheses about the English language based on limited exposure to it ‘An Error Analysis of English Writing Through 153
Korean College Students” English Compositions
(Schachter and Celce-Murcia, 1980 : 122). Kosofsky comments on the
uniqueness of Korean students’ English error.
It is not unfair to characterize the [educational] system as rigid and
uniform, Students are taught in a fixed method, according to a
uniform syllabus, from prescribed texts, in preparation for a stand-
ized, nationwide examination, This fixed regimen seems almost
never to be supplemented by any non-curricular English language
input, at least until students enter university (Kosofsky, 1987: v
-Introduction) .
2, It is rather hard to eliminate most of the students’ errors in writing
during a semester-long writing course ; however, PREP, CAP and PUN
likely can be taught efffectively in one semester in that those errors were
significantly decreased in that time,
3. The researcher’s correction-oriented instruction didn’t exert a
positive influence on the enhancement of students’ proficiency in writing.
Semke also found that “overt correction of student writing tended to have
negative side effects on both the quality of subsequent compositions and
on student attitudes toward writing in the foreign language” (Semke,
1984; Robb, Ross and Shortreed, 1986 : 84-85).
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Korean College Students’ English Compositions 155
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COMPOSITION EVALUATION SHEET
Spring, 1989 Name :
Sophomore
No. of ERRORS
ITEMS, 1)2)3)4)5)6)7)8]9/]10 Total
LW.F
2.A.G.
3.W.0
4.Art
5.W.C
“6. Prep
7.Cap. |
8,Pun, |
9.SP :
10.P.
1.0.W
12,N,S,
1B.7.S
Word Form(WF)-Verb Tense, Singular/Plural, Count/Non-count, Verb
Forms, Adjective Forms 156 Cha Kyung-whan
Agreement(AG)-Pronoun Agreement, S-V Agreement
Word Order(WO)}-S-V Word Order, Inverted Word Order
Article (Art) - (In) Definite Article
Word Choice(WC)
Preposition (Prep)
Capitalization (Cap)
Punctuation(Pun)-Commas, Apostrophe, Hyphen, Colon
Spelling (SP)
Paragraphing(P)
Omitted Word (OW)
Number of Sentences (NS)
Topic Sentence(TS) ‘An Error Analysis of English Writing Through 157
Korean College Stucents’ English Compositions
