Citation of Error Analysis Essay

html http//www. accentsasia. org/1-2/kato. pdf . G o o g l e html . summon 1 flashiness 1 calculate 2 October cc6 Accents Asia 1 honorable mention Kato, A. (2006). faulting comp give noticeium of laid-back school instruct savant stresss. Accents Asia Online, 1 (2), 1-13. ready(prenominal) http//www. accentsasia. org/1-2/kato. pdf flaw Analysis of High condition Student Essays Asako Kato Fudooka Seiwa High School IntroductionEver since the introduction of oral chat into the school curriculum in 1989, communicate has drawn maintenance as an important skill for Nipp onenessse students to master. A variety of speaking and bew argoning practices pull in been experimented within high school incline discriminatees. Writing has also been included as an extensive practice. The 2003 adjustment of the Course of Study emphasizes pen as a vehicle of communication to convey messages according to the purpose and the situation (MEXT, 2003).However, in um pteen of the university gate exam-oriented high schools, compose classes be modified into grammar-centered classes in some other linguistic process, the students atomic number 18 accustomed to writing short blames based upon the social systems or the grammar points they atomic number 18 taught, and chances of writing effective essays argon limited (Minegishi, 2005). It is true that grammar processing is removeed for absolute production, but it is a ch wholeenge to t from each one how to bring through essays or til now paragraphs within the available classroom hours, with the exception perhaps of some distant style elective courses in select high schools.Under these circumstances, the English subject Division of the Saitama Senior High School English Education and investigate Association hosts writing contests, for the purpose of encouraging students to test their English familiarity and to enhance their production skills in the form of writing. The contest consist s of 2 incisions a translation section and an essay writing rogue 2 slew 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 2 section. In the essay section the participants ar given guinea pigs and expected to write their opinions in nigh 200 words. They have 80 minutes to work on translation and essay writing.The translation sentences are assigned according to level, but the essay discipline is the same for entirely. The translation part is label and graded by Nipponese teachers the essays are evaluated by ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) according to tether criteria creativeness, organization and grammar. The winners are chosen dep last on the total points of the two sections. In this paper, I depart shed some light on the essays and analyze them with a dep mop up towards identifying puzzles students have, which will provide evidence of how English is intentional and what strategies students are employing to make debate their essays.The primary focus of this paper is on gra mmar in writing non creativity and organization, but some pedagogical suggestions for teaching and learning are also mentioned. Methods The data analyzed for this field of view are delusions in students essays written in an essay competition held in Saitama Prefecture, Japan. In this contest, the participants were given the topic, If you were to get together a celebrity, who would you akin to meet? What would you like to ask him/her? What would you like to do with him/her? The com wanderer breaks in the essays were categorized based on Ferris (2005) Analysis Model (Fig. 1). Her jet ESL writing errors fall into quartet categories structural errors, lexical errors, syntactical errors, and machinelike errors. This amaze is based upon the Description of the major(ip) error categories (Fig. 2), which covers verb errors, noun ending errors, bind errors, word wrong, and sentence structure (p. 92). According to James (1998), an error analysis model must be well-developed, highly elaborated, and self-explanatory (p. 95). Ferris model fulfills these needs.With this dodge it is easy to identify global and topical anesthetic errors (Burt and Kiparsky, 1972, cited in James, 1998) which I added to Ferris model of major errors in Figure 1. Global errors are major errors in sentence structure, which makes a sentence gruelling or impossible to understand, whereas local anesthetic errors are minor mistakes, which do non ca expend problems of comprehension. In Ferris classification, syntactic errors are considered global errors. Mechanical and lexical mistakes, on the other hand, are local errors. geomorphologic errors base be global errors, Page 3 record 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 3 but when they do not baffle readers reasonableness of the content they are local errors. Figure 1 joint ESL Writing Errors based on Ferris(2005) Model Morphological Errors global / local errors Verbs Tense, From, Subject-verb intellect Nouns Articles/determiners , Noun endings (plural/possessive) Lexical Errors local errors Word choice, Word form, liberal usage, dialect error, Pronoun error Syntactic Errors global errors sentence structure, Run-ons, Fragments Mechanical local errorsPunctuation, Spelling, capitalisation* * Capitalization is added in this study. Figure 2 Description of major error categories (Ferris, 2005) Verb errors All errors in verb tense or form, including germane(predicate) subject-verb agreement errors. Noun ending errors Plural or progressive ending incorrect, omitted, or unnecessary includes relevant subject-verb agreement errors Article errors Article or other determiner incorrect, omitted, or unnecessary Word wrong All specific lexical errors in word choice or word form, including preposition and pronoun errors.Spelling errors save included if the (apparent) spell resulted in an actual English word. Sentence structure Errors in sentence/cla utilisation boundaries(run-ons, fragments, comma splices), word or der, omitted words or phrases, unnecessary words or phrases other unidiomatic sentence construction. Participants The essays analyzed for this study were written by 148 high school students 46 original course of instruction students, 58 blurb social class students, and 44 leash family students 48 males and 100 females. The participants high schools consisted of twenty public schools and two private schools.Most of these Page 4 chroma 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 4 schools are considered academic high schools in that they prepare students for university exams, which means the students tend to be highly do and are expected to be able to utilize their English grammar, structure experience and vocabulary in writing. Procedure All errors were marked and classified. They were first classified into global errors or local errors. The verb-related errors were considered as verb errors, therefore, they were considered morphologic errors.However, confusion in the use of tran sitive verb/intransitive verbs was considered a global syntactic error because it affects the whole sentence structure. Also, tense errors were anticipated because the essay topic If you were to meet a celebrity? presumably requires the use of the conditional. As pertinacious as the errors did not interfere with the understanding of the sentence, they were put into tense errors, i. e. , morphological errors. It was some times difficult to draw the line in the midst of lexical errors and windup(prenominal) errors that is, whether the word is a wrong choice or simply a spelling mistake.If the word had a separate centre but exists as a word, then it was treated as lexical error otherwise, it was marked as a robotic error. However, if an inappropriate word choice disrupts the meaning in the whole sentence, it was considered a syntactic error. In short, the decision of error classification depends on each sentence. As for repeated mechanical errors in the same sentence, i. e. , spe lling mistakes, punctuation, and capitalization, the multiple mistakes were counted as one. Findings and Discussion First of all, not all errors were easily categorized some went beyond and across the categories.In each cause, errors were carefully identified and classified according to the seriousness of the problem. If one major error included other minor errors, then together they were considered to be a major error. For example, a sentence *And, I want to *go to abroad such(prenominal) as the UK, the US, *French, *Australlia and so on was categorized as one syntactic error because the misuse of verb and adverb (go to abroad) causes sentence diffusion, even though this sentence included one lexical error Page 5 hoi polloi 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 5 (French) and one mechanical error (Australlia).Secondly, a danger with lists of common ESL/EFL errors, as Ferris (2005) herself points out, is that they may be over-generalized to all students. Of course, individual stude nts have different language capabilities and learning traits for example, one student constantly omitted articles and another student confuse tense of verbs all through her essay. Although the statistics give a general picture of the problems, these do not apply to every student. While keeping these considerations in mind, the statistics provide evoke information.The total number of errors was 1518 (596 in 46 first twelvemonth essays, 491 in 58 sec year essays, and 431 in 44 third year essay). The average number of errors per student was 13. 5 for the first year students, 11. 2 for the second year students, and 9. 8 for the third year students. Considering the short distance of the essay, these were not small numbers, although the average number of errors decreased according to the students year in school. As a total, syntactic errors dominated the rest at 29%, followed by lexical errors (21%), morphological errors in nouns and mechanical errors (18%), and morphological errors (1 4%).According to the school year, the most common errors observed in first year essays were lexical errors, which comprised 24% of the total, while syntactic errors comprised most errors in second and third year essays, which amounted to 35. 2% and 31. 1% respectively. Among the first years lexical errors, word choice was the most common mistake (93 in total). As for second year and third year samples, as many as 158 and 121 errors were made respectively in sentence structure. These findings indicate that first year students did not have sufficient vocabulary while the second and third year students did not use it adequately.Page 6 Volume 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 6 Table 1. Common EFL Writing Errors in Nipponese High School Students Essays Percentage of natural Errors Marked (%) Error pillow slip 1st year 2nd year 3rd year intermediate Morphological Errors Lexical Errors Syntactic Errors Mechanical (Verbs) Tense Form Subject-verb agreement Total Verb Errors (Nouns) Articles/determiners Noun endings Total Noun Errors Word choice Word form Informal usage Idiom error Pronoun error Total Lexical Errors Sentence structure Run-ons Fragments Total Syntactic Errors Punctuation Spelling CapitalizationTotal Mechanical Errors 5. 87 5. 87 0. 67 12. 4 10. 6 8. 22 18. 8 15. 6 1. 51 1. 01 3. 19 2. 68 24. 0 15. 3 1. 34 3. 19 19. 8 5. 7 14. 4 4. 87 25. 0 8. 96 1. 22 2. 65 12. 8 11. 0 5. 91 16. 9 13. 6 4. 07 0. 61 1. 02 3. 87 23. 2 32. 2 0. 61 2. 44 35. 2 1. 43 6. 11 4. 28 11. 8 11. 1 2. 09 4. 64 17. 9 9. 98 8. 12 18. 1 9. 51 3. 25 0. 23 1. 16 2. 55 16. 7 28. 1 1. 86 1. 16 31. 1 1. 86 11. 4 3. 02 16. 2 8. 66 3. 06 2. 65 14. 4 10. 5 7. 42 17. 9 12. 9 2. 94 0. 62 1. 79 3. 04 21. 3 25. 2 1. 27 2. 26 28. 7 3. 0 10. 6 4. 05 17. 7 Percentage of Total Errors Marked 14% 18% 21% 29% 18%Morphological Error Verbs Morphological Error Nouns Lexical Error Syntactic Error Mechanical Error Percentage of Errors by Year 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 1 2 3 Year Mechanical Error Syntact ic Error Lexical Error Morphological Error Nouns Morphological Error Verbs Page 7 Volume 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 7 The syntactic errors, the most normal errors, were mainly related to verbs, for example, the misuse of be-verbs, transitive and intransitive verbs, auxiliary verbs, no verb use, the word order in indirect questions, and tense confusion in affinity to the conditional.From an English educators point of view, it was rather scotch that many students made errors in the use of basic verbs such as go, want and listen, such as in *I want to go my future, *I want become a doctor, and *I want to listen the story. In the case of errors in conditional sentences, on the other hand, the structure was usually well-formedly correct, but the meaning was irrational. For example, if a writer mentioned a celebrity such as a historical man/woman, movie actor, singer, athlete or an imaginary character, s/he had to make the sentence conditional.However, some used simple prese nt tense. One of these examples is, *If I ride Doraemons time machine, I basis go everywhere. This type of error was put into verb tense errors under morphological errors. As an explanation of Nipponese students use of conditional, Thompson (2001) asserts that even when students have mastered the mechanics of forming unreal conditionals and wishes in all their complexity, the problem of concept remains. Additionally, it is difficult for Japanese students to use conditionals correctly, for there is a disparity in the use of conditionals in English and Japanese.Another characteristic in the syntactic errors stemed from interference from Japanese, their mother tongue (L1 interference). L1 interference is considered a major obstacle to second and foreign language acquisition (Ellis, 2003 Ferris, 2005 Lightbrown & Spada, 2002 Littlewood, 2002. Some examples from students essays are as follows (a)* He challenged. ( ) (b)* They hit all over the world since 1984. ( 1984 ) In these senten ces, the writers used English equivalents for the Japanese words, i. e. , (a) chousen-suru=challenge, and (b) itto-suru=hit. Incidentally, the verbs challenge and hit are transitive verbs, which means these sentences are grammatically incorrect therefore, they were classified as syntactic errors. Other syntactic errors from L1 interference are observed in Page 8 Volume 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 8 relation to the choice of prepositions. The examples are (c) *I will join to childrens intercommunicate of UNICEF. ( ) (d) *I want to marry with him. ( ) The writers translated the Japanese prepositional particle ? ni into to in example (c) and ? to into with in example (d). This type of error is common among Japanese students because transitive verbs include prepositions in their Japanese meanings therefore it is hard to severalise whether a verb is transitive or prepositional from the translated meanings. The second dominant error category was that of lexical errors, especi ally in first year student essays. Here again L1 interference was observed in word choices. (e) *I think his baseball soul is the biggest of all. ( ) (f) *I want to hear Murasaki Shikibu three questions. 3 ) In (e), soul and big do not mates with each other in this context. The writer meant to say, I think he has the strongest scent in baseball. In Japanese soul and spirit are given the same translation as ? ( )tamashii. Besides, neither soul nor spirit can be big but rather strong. In (f), the verb hear is derived from the Japanese word ( ) kiku, which can also mean listen or ask in Japanese. These students bring downmed to have picked up words without persuasion about content and collocation.Presumably, in English class, there is a inclination of an orbit for students not to consult dictionaries for language usage but to look up word meaning only, then memorize the main translation of the word, and use this translation regardless of context. The third and fourth prominent error categories were noun related morphological errors and mechanical errors, especially spelling mistakes. In noun errors, article errors outnumbered the rest, history for as much as 10% of the total. The problem with articles stems from the fact that the Japanese language has no concept of articles and the countable and uncountable distinction.It is natural that Japanese students have difficulty in using them correctly. In addition, articles are introduced near the end in many of grammar textbooks, which in a sense is parallel to the language Page 9 Volume 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 9 acquisition order described by Littlewood (2002) of a study of children acquiring morphemes in their native language. Plurals and articles have always been, and will continue to be difficult to teach to Japanese students, which is why some teachers wait until the end of school year to introduce them in class.Spelling mistakes, sorted as mechanical errors, comprised 10% of the total number of errors. This was partly because many students applied Japanese (katakana) pronunciation to English spellings. For example, writers who spelled *performence (performance), *calacter (character), and *confort (comfort) did not seem to spell according to his/her understanding of the pronunciation, but from how the words sound through the filter of katakana. Lastly the problem of organization as well as the use of joins needs to be mentioned.Sentences attempting with because were categorized as fragments which belonged to syntactic errors, whereas sentences starting with and and so were not treated as errors. And and so are taught as conjunctions that connect two phrases that carry equal weight in the sentence, whereas because is taught as a conjunction followed by a subordinate clause. However, the fact is that as many as 75 ands and 89 sos were observed at the beginning of the students sentences. James (1998) states that learners tend to overuse connectors to deem logical relat ionships between propositions that just do not exist.It is probable that few students have learned how to organize English writing that is, they do not know they should start with an introduction, followed by a main body, and then a conclusion, paying attention to the consistency of their thoughts. Those who were not familiar with English writing ended up listing items in order who they wanted to meet, what they would like to do, and where they would like to go. Without viscid devices such as paraphrasing and rephrasing, or markers that direct the logical flow of sentences, the writers could not communicate their ideas effectively.Conclusion How, then, can teachers empower students to become better writers? Obviously the class time allotted for writing is limited, yet there are things teachers can do in order to improve students Page 10 Volume 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 10 writing in other English classes. Judging from the fact that sentence fragments outnumbered other er rors in this study, teachers need to draw students attention to the whole sentence structure and sentence feature when discussing verbs and other grammar points in class.The confusion between transitive/intransitive verbs and prepositional verbs can be pointed out in reading class, bringing cognisance to the differences between English and Japanese. When students come up with a new verb, or even a familiar one, they should be aware of the conceptual orifice between English and Japanese. One good example of a adjourn between Japanese and English is the word (to see). There are many more English verbs for miru. In Japanaese miru is used when you perceive with your eyes, when you watch, look, view, overlook or investigate when you take care of somebody like children or macabre people, as in kodomo wo miru.You can even say miru when you try something, like mitemiru or yattemiru, literally try to see and try to do respectively. Therefore, it is confusing for students to select the suitable equivalent of miru in English. They have to think about the context. Kowalski (2005) gives usages of in Figure 4 Figure 4 Different kinds of meanings associated with see (something that falls within your field of vision) look (intentionally at a unmoving object) watch (something moving) Also, the gap between English and Japanese applies not only at sentential level but also to the lexical level.As I mentioned earlier, L1 interference affects both sentence structure and word choice. Underlying knowledge of usage and collocation enables students to choose the indemnify words in right the places in their writing. Because of the avalanche of Japanese-English in the media, however, it has become even more difficult to eliminate these Japanglish words from students vocabulary. Teachers and learners should pay special attention not honour these words and phrases in the English language classroom. Page 11 Volume 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 11Good writing, however, d oes not rely only on grammatical and lexical accuracy but also on the creativity in context and the logical flow of sentences. In order to write coherent, well-structured paragraphs and essays, the writers have to be creative and concentrate on the content as well. First, teachers can help students raise their awareness of how to organize English writing, and how units of sentences and paragraphs are connected with one another to form meaningful text. By recognizing the splendor of coherency in their writing, the students can dedicate themselves to the ideas or message that they are trying to convey.I employ process writing for the improvement of this skill. In argumentation to translation or guided composition, process writing emphasizes the processes such as planning, drafting, and reviewing (Johnson & Johnson, 1998 cited in Furneaux, 2000). In this contest, only a few participants seemed to employ this approach, perchance because of the time constraints of the competition. By reflecting on their writing process, students will internalize their grammatical and lexical knowledge and utilize it for production.Another effective approach to improve writing skill is to work on other language skills. All four skills are interconnected. Even though writing classes are not consistently available in school curriculums, compared to reading and oral communication classes, students can cultivate their writing skills by consciously reading or listen. Krashen and Terrell (1983) margin call that speech and writing production emerges by focusing on listening and reading. Extensive reading outside of the class, for instance, will become a bountiful source for extensive writing.Exposure to authentic writing will help students put out their vocabulary and write well-organized, reasonably cohesive essays. In conclusion, I believe that Japanese students can become competent writers of English with the appropriate support from teachers. Quoting Kramsch (1993) Teachers have to impart a body of knowledge, but learners have to recognise that knowledge for themselves in order to internalize it (p. 6). I suggest that teachers conflate the grammar focus while encouraging creativity and teaching organizational form.Learners, on the other hand, can enrich their knowledge of language by victorious every opportunity to use it, developing learning strategies outside of the class, and reflecting on the writing process before, during and after they write. Page 12 Volume 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 12 References Ellis, R. (2003). Second language acquisition. (8 th ed. ). Oxford Oxford University Press. Ferris, D. R. (2005). sermon of error in second language writing. Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press. Furneaux, C. (2000). cultivate writing.The University of Reading school of linguistics and applied language studies. Retrieved September 29, 2005, from http//www. rgd. ac. uk/AcaDeps/cl/slas/process. htm James, C. (1998). Errors in language lea rning and use Exploring error analysis. Essex Pearson Education Limited. Kowalski, C. (2005). interpretation in the writing class friend or foe? In K. Bradford-Watts, C. Ikeguchi, & M. Swanson (Eds. ). JALT2004 league Proceedings. Tokyo JALT Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. sassy York Oxford University Press. Krashen, S. D. Terrell, T. (1983). The natural approach Language acquisition in the classroom. San FranciscoThe Alemany Press. Lightbrown, P. M. & Spada, N. (2002). How languages are learned. (2 nd. ed). Oxford Oxford University Press. Littlewood, W. (2002). impertinent and second language learning. (17 th ed. ). Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Minegishi, H. (2005, March). The questionnaire result. Saitama high school English breeding bulletin, 41. 49-59. Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. The course of study for foreign languages. 2003, March). Retrieved November 20, 2005, from http//www. mext. go. jp/englis h/shotou/030301. htm Sonoda, N. (2005). A comparative study of two approaches to English writing translation and process writing. In K. Bradford-Watts, C. Ikeguchi, & M. Swanson (Eds. ). JALT2004 Conference Proceedings. Tokyo JALT Thompson, I. (2001). Japanese speakers. In M. Swan & B. Smith (Eds), Learner English A Page 13 Volume 1 Number 2 October 2006 Accents Asia 13 teachers guide to interference and other problems. Cambridge Cambridge University Press.