Constructionism and error analysis to understand and improve written english composition of thai software engineering students

• Main Authors: Saeheaw T., Meksamoot K., Chakpitak N., Sipitakiat A., Adipattaranan N.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. 2014
• Online Access: http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84899823032&partnerID=40&md5=13b3317a35b8ad549db3f0e52838c932; http://cmuir.cmu.ac.th/handle/6653943832/1234
• Institution: Chiang Mai University

To improve Thailand's higher education students' written English skills, this paper presents a learning innovation: the remedial framework targeting software engineering students, by integrating constructionism philosophy and leverages error analysis as a key mechanism to assess students' writing. Results show the most common errors are capitalisation, noun phrase, verb phrase, semantic word selection, determiner phrase, calque, and plural-s. The assessment of a pretest and posttest written exercise was statistically significant improvements. This paper suggests that the new framework and assessment technique can improve Thais' written English by shifting from the grammar-based learning method to reach higher levels of learning. © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.