Foreign

Chuang (2005) carried out at The Centre for English Language Teacher
Education, University of Warwick, UK, a corpus linguistics based error analysis (EA),
in which 50 student essays (88000 words) were scrutinized for formal errors. An
examination of all the errors showed that the foundation students formal errors fell
into broad categories. The top ten broad categories were determiners (23.7%),
nouns (15.3%), verbs (7.6%), grammatical prepositions (6.9%), lexical
misconceptions (5.8%), punctuation (5.1%), sentence parts (4.1%), tenses and
aspects (3.8%), modals (3.5%) and lexical-grammatical prepositions and syntactic
complementation of a word (3.3%). This clearly indicated that mismanagement of
the article system is the most frequent cause of error in Chinese foundation year
student writing.

Jeongsook (2005) made a study to identify and examine in what different

ways native speakers of Korean (ESL) and native speakers of English write English
argumentative compositions regarding error types, textual organization, and
cohesion device. The study involved 46 American students and 46 Korean students
who were enrolled in Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. The findings from
this study suggest that, in general terms, the Korean ESL students wrote shorter
essays and showed more errors, more textual organization patterns, and less use of
cohesion devices. However, a similarity between the two groups was also found.
The Korean students made article errors most often, and the American students'
errors were, to a lesser degree, with preposition and article errors. Analysis also
showed the nationality variable significantly accounted for essay length and total
errors.

Sattayatham and Honsa (2007) explored the most frequent errors of medical
students at four medical schools at Mahidol University, Thailand. Three pieces of
writing by each of the 237 first year medical students in the year 2001 were
analyzed and it was found that the most frequent errors from this data were on the
syntactic and lexical levels with inadequate lexical and syntactic knowledge leading
to the errors of overgeneralization, incomplete rule application, omission, and
building of false concepts. Within these errors, mother-tongue interference was
detected. However, some linguistic items, such as articles, tense, and verb forms
appeared to be the source of frequent errors. The errors were found to result from
inadequate learning as well as the complexity of English structure.