AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF THE WRITTEN ENGLISH ESSAYS OF CHINESE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN MALAYSIA

• Main Author: QIAO, CHANG LIN
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, (UNIMAS) 2020
• Subjects: PN Literature (General)
• Online Access: http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/34823/3/Chang%20QL.pdf; http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/34823/
• Institution: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

This study aims to identify and analyse errors found in essays produced by Chinese university students in Malaysia. The frequencies of errors in each category and the sources of the errors were determined. The researcher performed an error analysis on 46 English written essays entitled “My Best Friend” produced by 46 participants that were selected through purposive sampling. To determine the frequencies of each error category, the errors were grouped into 19 categories. The errors in the 19 error categories were then grouped according to the surface strategy taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982). Besides, the classification of sources of errors proposed by Richards (1974) was adapted into three sources, i.e. Chinese influenced errors, Malay influenced errors and intralingual errors. It was found that the five most common errors are verb tense errors, singular/plural errors, verb choice errors, determiner errors and preposition choice errors. Besides, the source of errors found with the highest frequency is Chinese influenced errors with a frequency of 497 instances (58.3%), followed by Malay influenced errors with 403 instances (47.2%) and intralingual errors (363 instances, 42.6%). Most Chinese and Malay influenced errors were due to verb tense omission, singular/plural omission, determiner omission, verb choice omission and verb tense misinformation. On the contrary, interlingual errors were due to verb tense misinformation, punctuation omission, spelling misinformation, verb tense addition and verb choice misinformation.