MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY NGUYEN THI THU THUY AN INVESTIGATION INTO COMMON ERRORS IN PARAGRAPH WRITING OF THE 10 TH GRADE STUDENTS AT HONG LINH HIGH SCHOOL MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION NGHE AN - 2014 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY NGUYEN THI THU THUY AN INVESTIGATION INTO COMMON ERRORS IN PARAGRAPH WRITING OF THE 10 TH GRADE STUDENTS AT HONG LINH HIGH SCHOOL Major:Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Code: 60.14.01.11 MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION Supervisor: TRAN BA TIEN, Ph.D. NGHE AN, 2014 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby acknowledge that this study is mine. The data and findings discussed in the thesis are true, used with permission, and have not been published elsewhere. Author Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest thanks to my supervisor Dr. Tran Ba Tien who has enthusiastically helped and encouraged me during the period of writing this research paper. Without his experienced guidance, valuable comments and tireless help, I couldn’t have completed the study on time. My gratitude also goes to all of the instructors in my MA. program at the Foreign Languages Department, Vinh University. With their precious and professional lectures and tutoring, I can understand difficult basic concepts related to English teaching methodology, I am also grateful to all my friends and colleagues and my beloved family, who gave me useful advice on writing process. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the kind help of the 10 th students at Hong Linh High School who helped me to collect data, and their valuable support for finishing the study. Vinh, September 2014 Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy ii ABSTRACT The findings of the thesis are mainly concerned with the common errors in writing by the tenth-form students at HLHS. The study reveals the most frequent types of errors made by the students. The greatest number of errors occurred in this study were morphological errors, lexical errors, syntactic errors and mechanical errors. The study also shows the errors of paragraph organization due to the fact that students at HLHS lack access to the theory of building a paragraph such as building topic sentences, developing supporting ideas. Based on the findings, implications for enhancing the effectiveness of English paragraph teaching and learning writing are put forward. It is hoped that the results of the study can be beneficial for both students and teachers. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Pages STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vi LIST OF TABLES vii Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1. Rationale 1 1.2. Scope of the study 2 1.3. Aims and objectives 2 1.3.1. Aims 2 1.3.2. Objectives 2 1.4. Research questions 3 1.5. Organization of the study 3 Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 4 2.1. Previous studies 4 2.2. Theoretical background 6 2.2.1. Teaching writing 6 2.2.1.1. Definition of writing 6 2.2.1.2. The reason for teaching writing 6 2.2.2. Approaches to writing teaching 7 2.2.2.1. Product approach 7 2.2.2.2. Process approach 7 2.2.3. Principles of teaching writing 9 2.3. Teaching paragraph writing 9 2.3.1. Definitions of Paragraph 9 2.3.2. Classifications of paragraph 10 2.3.2.1. Informative paragraph 11 2.3.2.2. Descriptive paragraph 11 2.3.2.3. Narrative paragraph 11 2.3.2.4. Persuasive paragraph 12 2.4. Writing process of paragraph 12 2.5. Error and error analysis 14 2.5.1. Error and error analysis 14 2.5.2. Sources of errors 18 2.5.3. Errors in writing 19 2.5.4. Error classification 20 Chapter 3 METHODOLOGY 24 3.1. Study setting 24 3.2. Participants 26 3.3. Research methods 26 3.4. Research procedures 26 3.5. Description of the sample 27 3.6. Data analysis 27 3.7. Reliability validity 27 Chapter 4 FINDING AND DISCUSSION 28 4.1. Error analysis 28 4.1.1. Morphological errors 29 4.1.1.1. Verb errors 30 4.1.1.2. Noun ending errors 34 iv 4.1.1.3. Article or determiner errors 35 4.1.2. Lexical errors 37 4.1.2.1. Errors in word choice 39 4.1.2.2. Errors in word form 39 4.1.2.3. Preposition errors 40 4.1.2.4. Pronoun errors 40 4.1.2.5. Spelling errors 41 4.1.3. Syntactic errors 42 4.1.3.1. Word order 43 4.1.3.2. Omitted words or phrases 45 4.1.3.4. Run-ons - comma splices 46 4.1.3.5. Fragments incomplete sentence 48 4.1.3.6. Unidiomatic sentence construction 49 4.1.4. Mechanical errors 51 4.2. Paragraph organization 52 4.2.1. Topic sentence 53 4.2.2. Supporting sentences 54 4.2.3. Concluding sentence 56 4.3. Some solutions to the problem 58 4.3.1. Suggestions on teaching how to write a paragraph 58 4.3.2. Suggestions on reviewing grammar and practicing writing 59 4.3.3. Suggestions on making drafts 60 4.3.4. Suggestions on teachers’ error correction 61 4.3.5. Suggestions on teachers’ checking 61 4.4. Summary 62 Chapter 5 CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 64 5.1. Conclusions 64 5.2. Implications 65 5.3. Limitations 67 5.4. Suggestions for further studies 67 REFERENCES 68 APPENDIX 72 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS DA : Discourse Analysis EA : Error Analysis EFL : English Foreign Language ELT : English Language Teaching HLHS : Hong Linh High School L1 : First Language L2 : Second Language S : Subject SLA : Second Language Acquisition TL : Target Language V : Verb vi LIST OF TABLES Pages Table 2.1. Common ESL Writing Errors Based on Ferris’ (2005) Model 22 Table 2.2. Description of major error categories (Ferris, 2005) 22 Table 4.1. Categories of errors in the paragraphs written by HLHS students 28 Figure 4.1. Errors in the paragraphs written by HLHS Students 29 Table 4.2. Morphological errors 29 Figure 4.2. Morphological errors 30 Table 4.3. Verb Errors 31 Figure 4.3. Verb errors 31 Table 4.4. Noun ending errors 34 Figure 4.4. Noun ending errors 34 Table 4.5. Article or determiner errors 36 Figure 4.5. Article or determiner errors 36 Table 4.6. Lexical Errors 38 Figure 4.6. Lexical errors 38 Table 4.7. Syntactic errors 42 Figure 4.7. Syntactic errors 43 Table 4.8. Mechanical Errors 51 Figure 4.8. Mechanical Errors 51 Table 4.9. Topic sentence display 53 Table 4.10. Organization of supporting sentence display 55 Table 4.11. Concluding sentence display 56 Table 4.12. Summary of Errors in Writing by HLHS Students 62 vii Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1. Rationale In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of the English writing skill at high schools in Vietnam. The writing skill is part of the English syllabus at high schools. In a school-year at high school, there are 105 periods for teaching English in which there is one fifth for teaching writing. Writing is one of the five parts of every unit in English textbooks from grade 10 to grade 12. Writing an English paragraph is a main activity as a result of the writing lesson in the tenth form. Some kinds of writing are writing descriptions, writing about people’s background, writing about the advantages and disadvantages of something. Writing paragraphs is basic to students’ development of their writing skill later. Writing a letter, writing a composition and writing an essay are based on writing a paragraph because they are constituted from some paragraphs. Hence it is very important for students to be taught how to write a paragraph. However, knowledge of how to write an English paragraph is not presented in the English textbooks. Although the students are required to write a paragraph, they have not been trained to construct a well-organized paragraph. Though writing a paragraph has been put into the eighth form textbooks, building a paragraph is still strange to HLHS students. They learn to write paragraphs with some help from their teachers. Sometimes their writing is nearly based on a model given out at the first part of a unit in the textbooks or on a reading passage. At the end of each writing lesson, they have to complete their writing task. Correspondingly, the result of teaching the English writing skill is still unsatisfactory and students still have many dificulties in writing English. While teaching English I find that my students have difficulties in writing. Some of these difficulties are problems related to grammar and vocabulary at sentence level. How to organize sentences into a larger unit like the paragraph is an 1 [...]... on the topic AN INVESTIGATION INTO COMMON ERRORS IN PARAGRAPH WRITING OF THE 10TH GRADE STUDENTS AT HONG LINH HIGH SCHOOL This thesis is carried out with the hope that the research results will provide certain linguistically useful practical knowledge for teachers in charge of the English writing skill at high schools and improving the students skill in writing an English paragraph Therefore, I perform... that students at Hong Linh High School can only avoid their errors in writing paragraph but also improve their paragraph writing skill 3.2 Participants The participants of the research consist of 240 students at Hong Linh High school They are the 10th grade students at Hong Linh high school in Ha Tinh province, Vietnam They are Vietnamese students from the age of 15 and 16 speaking Vietnamese fluently... “transfer” from the mother tongue Therefore, they reflect the native language structure Interference (negative transfer) is the negative influence of the L1 on the performance of the L2 learner (Lado, 1964) In the error analysis of my thesis, I will find both intralingual errors and interlingual errors in which the students have an incomplete application of rules, false concepts hypothesized in language structure... order errors Tran Thi Ngoc Hien in her research An Investigation into the Common Grammatical Errors Made by the Tenth Form Students at Danang High Schools”, presented most common grammatical errors (errors in tenses, errors in reported speech, errors in conditional sentences, errors in concord, errors in relative clauses, errors in preposition, errors in noun phrase, and errors in the structure “be... out the way of writing a paragraph and help them avoid mistakes It is a big problem for teachers of English at Hong Linh High School To find the best answer, I would like to search for the common errors and the causes of those errors that the students are likely to make After that I recommend some appropriate teaching strategies and useful exercises in my study with the hope that students at Hong Linh. .. second language), over-generalization (they create a deviant structure on the basis of their experience of other structures in the target language) and ignorance (they fail to observe the restrictions of existing structures) in learning English Gass and Selinker’s theory (1994) of steps in conducting an EA consists of collecting the data, identifying errors, classifying errors, quantifying errors, analysis... raised in the study It also includes the working definitions of the key terms in the study Chapter 3- Methodology This part concerns itself with the research design, the research methods, data description and the procedures of collecting and analyzing the data Chapter 4- Findings and Discussion This part deals with error analysis, finding errors in students writing and their organization of English paragraphs,... errors of particular groups of learners For instance, in An Investigation into Common Written Errors Made by High- School Pupils in Danang”, Vo Khac Tien presented most types of common written errors made by high- school pupils in Danang such as misspellings, punctuation errors, lexical errors, verbal errors, prepositional errors, article errors, errors in concord, morphology errors and word order errors. .. evaluate the writing skills of my students in writing a paragraph in English and identify their errors in order to develop guidelines for correction and improvement of their writing skills 1.2 Scope of the study The study investigates English paragraphs written by the tenth form Vietnamese students at HLHS, particularly focusing on the discourse features of the English paragraph The study is confined... subject in Vietnam, and students start learning as a foreign language from 6th grade to 12th grade In class, students exhibit at different proficiency and levels of four skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing 3.3 Research methods The design of the study is based on the combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches The qualitative approach is used in describing an analyzing data to find . MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY NGUYEN THI THU THUY AN INVESTIGATION INTO COMMON ERRORS IN PARAGRAPH WRITING OF THE 10 TH GRADE STUDENTS AT HONG LINH HIGH SCHOOL MASTER. SCHOOL MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION NGHE AN - 2014 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY NGUYEN THI THU THUY AN INVESTIGATION INTO COMMON ERRORS IN PARAGRAPH WRITING OF THE 10 TH GRADE STUDENTS AT. producing errors. For this reason, I choose to do research on the topic AN INVESTIGATION INTO COMMON ERRORS IN PARAGRAPH WRITING OF THE 10TH GRADE STUDENTS AT HONG LINH HIGH SCHOOL . This thesis