ESSAY WRITING ERRORS OF ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS AT NHA TRANG UNIVERSITY AND SOME SUGGESTIONS TO REDUCE ERRORS

Abstract

Writing is an essential and important skill to study and success of English-major students; however, writing skills are also difficult to students. Students have to use language to convey their ideas, develop ideas, choose appropriate words and check grammar. Therefore, students usually commit errors in writing essays. The purpose of this paper is to list errors and error frequency in the subject of Writing 3, writing essays, and propose solutions to reduce students’ errors. The research population was 40 English-major students of the course 63 and the research objects were their errors from 120 papers of the pretest, mid-term test and final exam. Students wrote essays of comparison and contrast, causes and effects and argumentative essays. Both qualitative methods (interviews) and quantitative methods (error statistics, and online survey) were utilized in this paper. Research results showed that the most common errors of students at Nha Trang University were no topic sentences, verb forms, singular and plural nouns, spelling, abbreviation and word choice. From the results of this study, lecturers and students will pay attention to these errors in teaching and learning so that students’ essay writing skills will be improved.