An analysic of common grammatical errors in english by 10 th graders and some pedagogical recommendations

make in their writings and suggesting some solutions to help students learn Englishgrammar in particular and English in general better.For the above reasons, the author decides to choose

ministry of education and training

vinh university

nguyÔn thÞ thu hoµi

An analysis of common grammatical

PEDAGOGICAL RECOMMENDATIONS

( Phân tích lỗi ngữ pháp tiếng Anh thường gặp của học

sinh lớp 10 và một số đề xuất sư phạm)

MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION

Vinh, 2011

DECLARATION

The thesis is the study of my own research and the substance of the thesis haswholly or in part submitted for a degree to any other universities or institutions.

Nguyễn Thị Thu Hoài

Secondly, I would like to thanks all the lecturers from the Department ofForeign Languages, Vinh University who have given me many helpful andinteresting lectures which evoke the inspiration to me to carry out this work.

Finally, my thanks go to my classmates as well as my family for theirassistance during the time I implemented this work

Nowadays, English is one of the compulsory subjects that are taught at anyschools from primary school to university However, teaching English to uppersecondary students has long been a controversial issue This research investigatesthe errors made by 10th form students at Nguyen Cong Tru High School and to findout the sources for those errors as well as to give some pedagogicalrecommendations to the teachers and students

The thesis is divided into 5 chapters:

Chapter I presents the rationale, aims, methods, scope and organization of thepaper

Chapter II presents the theoretical background of the thesis that the authorbases on to implement the paper

In chapter III the author describes the methods that she bases on to conductthe research In this paper, she specially applies the method of making surveys tocollect the statistics from the students

Chapter IV is to analyze the data collected from the surveys All theinformation collected from the students’ papers are put into consideration andproceeded in this chapter

Chapter V is very important in terms of giving out the pedagogicalrecommendations for better studying and teaching Besides, the suggestions forfurther research are also given to help later studies easier to research

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 3

1 Rationale of the study 3

2 Aims of the study 4

3 Research questions 4

4 Scope of the study 4

5 Methods of the study 5

6 Design of the study 5

CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW 6

2.1 Grammar 6

2.1.1 Definition 6

2.1.2 Grammatical terms 7

2.2 Errors 13

2.2.1 Errors and Mistakes 13

2.2.2 Error analysis 15

2.2.3 Classification of errors 18

2.2.4 Sources of errors 21

2.2.5 Trend of error analysis 24

CHAPTER III: RESEARCH METHODODOLOGY 26

3.1 Research questions 26

3.2 Research method 26

3.3 Settings and participants of the study 27

3.3.1 Settings for the study 27

3.3.2 Participants of the study 27

3.4 Procedure of data collection 28

CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS, DISCUSSION AND PEDAGOGICAL RECOMMENDATIONS 30

4.1 Findings 30

4.2 Discussion 35

4.2.1 The frequency of errors 35

4.2.2 The most common errors 37

4.2.3 The causes of errors 47

4.3 Recommendations 53

4.3.1 Recommendations for presentation 53

4.3.2 Practice activities 58

4.3.4 Recommendations for giving feedback 63

CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION 66

5.1 Recapitulation 66

5.2 Suggestions for further research 67

REFERENCES 68 APPENDIX

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale of the study

Today, English has become one of the most important languages tocommunicate from country to country It is the common language to address theglobal issues such as environment, politics, etc Besides, it is the language to beused in the international contracts, agreements, etc Along with the development ofthe society, English has shown its significance all over the world Today, peoplefocus on learning this language with different purposes such as promotion in job,travelling the world, etc For whatever purposes they have, English is the mostuseful means to achieve the goals People can feel the power of the language as itenters into every field of life such as politics, tourism, economics, culture, science,etc As the demand of the real life, it is necessary for people in the whole worldespecially one of the developing countries like Vietnam to learn English

In addition, as a teacher at high school, the author finds herself stuck toteaching grammar to the students Thus, teaching grammar can catch her interest interms of experience and hobby However, the traditional teaching of Englishgrammar is deductive, hindering the students’ communication skills How to teachEnglish grammar communicatively is the question which urges her to choose thetopic about the field of grammar

Besides, the author finds that her students make a lot of grammaticalmistakes in their writing From the reality of teaching and the enthusiasm toteaching career, she wants to make some contributions to the improvement of thestudents especially in writing tests It is common knowledge that people alwayshave errors That is the reason why there exists a famous saying: “to error ishuman” This fact is completely true for the students, although they have learnedEnglish grammar again and again They still have errors while doing tests Startingfrom the recognition of the importance of addressing the problems with students’common errors, the author focuses on finding the typical errors students always

make in their writings and suggesting some solutions to help students learn Englishgrammar in particular and English in general better.

For the above reasons, the author decides to choose the topic: “An analysis

of common grammatical English errors by the 10th graders at high school and somepedagogical recommendations” with the hope to make a small contribution to theimprovement of the students’ grammar

2 Aims of the study

By working on this topic, the author aims to:

- Investigate the common grammatical English errors committed by the 10th

grade students at Nguyen Cong Tru High School in their writing and analyze theseerrors

- Suggest some solutions to help students avoid grammatical errors andimprove the linguistic accuracy in their writing

3 Research questions

To fully achieve the aims set forth above, the author tries to answer thefollowing questions:

- What are the common grammatical English errors committed by the 10th

graders at Nguyen Cong Tru High School?

- What are the suggested activities to help the students avoid these errors aswell as learn grammar better?

4 Scope of the study

It has been acknowledged that grammar is a huge field that contains manysubfields However, due to the limitation of time and knowledge, as the researcher

of this study the author tries her best to fulfil the study of the common grammaticalEnglish errors made by the10th grade students at Nguyen Cong Tru High School.She finds that it is beyond her reach to study the errors of all four skills so she onlyfocuses on working with the errors in the written work Within the frame of thisstudy, she also provides some suggestions to improve grammar teaching andlearning at Nguyen Cong Tru High School

5 Methods of the study

For the sake of the teaching and learning of English, as this study is carriedout, the author has applied the two methods: quantitative and qualitative

6 Design of the study

The thesis consists of 5 main chapters Chapter I, Introduction, deals with theauthor’s reasons for choosing the topic of the study, the aims, scope, researchmethods and the design of the study Chapter II, entitled Literature Review,provides an overview on the theoretical background and the analysis of the errors.Chapter III is about the research methods in which the research questions, researchapproach, research instrument, data collection, participants and context of the studyand procedure of investigation are given Chapter IV, “Findings and discussions”,analyzes the results of the questionnaires and gives the assessment on the commonerrors made by the 10th graders at Nguyen Cong Tru High School This chapter alsoprovides some suggested solutions to help students avoid these common errors andimprove their writing skill Chapter V, “Conclusion” is the summary of the mainpoints presented in the study The study ends with the “References” which lists allthe materials and sources of the information used in the study and the “Appendix”

CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter, Literature Review, will present the previous studies related tothe errors analysis in the context of second language teaching It will then focus onthe issues related to errors analysis in second language acquisition Classificationand sources of errors are two main issues which will be carefully discussed in thereview Finally, a summary of the chapter will conclude the literature review

2.1 Grammar

2.1.1 Definition

Starting to learn a language, people start to learn its grammar Students havelearned English grammar since they were children This is an aspect catching manylinguists’ attention Thus, there are different understandings as well as definitions ofthis term

Grammar is defined by Ur (1995: 75) as the ways words are put together tomake correct sentences This definition, following his idea, is the oversimplification

of the term grammar This term is used to decide whether a given sentence is correct

or not For example, “She is an actress” is correct while “She is a actress”, “She anactress” or “She is actress” are not grammatically correct

The term “grammatical” can be applied for the units that are smaller thansentences such as phrases or single words For instance, “a beautiful girl” is correctbut “a girl beautiful” is not a correct one Considering this term to single word such

as the verb “buy” in the past of “bought”, if it is written as “buyed”, this is notgrammatically accepted

Furthermore, the minimal components to be combined may not be the wholeword, it can be a part of the word such as the prefixes or suffixes For example, thesuffix “ed” indicates the form of the past tense of the regular verbs and the suffix

“s” can be understood as a device to recognize the plural form of the nouns Byadding sub-word components initially or preceding the stems may change thespelling or pronunciation in different contexts

In general, grammar is about how sentences and utterances are formed In atypical English sentence, people can see how two most basic principles of grammar:they are the arrangement of items called Syntax and the structures of items calledMorphology Syntax is the arrangement of the words or phrases in the sentences due

to certain rules and orders to make them grammatical Morphology is the formation

of the words such as the sub-word components

In short, grammar can be considered the science which treats of theprinciples of language, the study of forms of speech, and their relations to oneanother, the art concerned with the right use and application of the rules of alanguage in any form of speaking or writing

2.1.2 Grammatical terms

It is common that to teach or to study any field, teachers or researchers have

to work with the technical terms of the field They are the terms used in the branch

of grammar

2.1.2.1 Units of language

As it is globally acknowledged, the largest unit of language is “text” or

“discourse” However, to teach grammar, it will be more convenient and useful ifthe language is divided into smaller units such as clause, phrase, word andmorpheme

- The sentence:

The sentence is a set of words standing on their own as a sense of unit, itsconclusion marked by a full stop or equivalent such as a question mark or anexclamation mark In most languages, the sentences begin with a capital letter

For example, “She bought a new car” This is considered a full sentence with

a full stop at the end of the sentence and the initial letter is capitalized Besides, “Doyou like coffee?” or “What an extraordinary book it is!” are also in the unit ofsentence although they do not end with the full stop The question mark and theexclamation mark function equally to the full stop in terms of dividing the units ofthe language

← - The clause:

The clause is a kind of mini-sentence, that is, a set of words which make asense of unit But the clause is may not be concluded by a full stop A sentence cancontain one or more clauses

For instance, “”she likes funny boys” is a sentence which includes only aclause “She likes funny boys but her sister likes quiet men” contains two clausesand “she likes funny boys because she finds that they are always interested” containthree clauses In fact, a sentence may contain many clauses

- The phrase:

The phrase is a shorter unit within clause A phrase may consist of one oremore words but if fulfill the same function as a single word like a verb phrase mayfunction as a verb or a noun phrase functions as a noun

For example, “She goes to school” and “She is going to school”, to play thefunction of the verb in the sentence, the verb “goes” is equal to the phrase “isgoing”

← - The word:

The word is the minimum form of the language that is separatable In any writing,words appear as a stretch of letters with a space either side In other words, word isthe smallest separatable unit of language that is bounded by two spaces A word can

be presented by a sound or combinational sounds and in printing or writing thatsymbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or

a combination of morphemes

← - Morpheme:

Morpheme is the smallest unit of language It is a bit of language which can

be perceived as a distinct component within a word Take the word “unhappy” as anexample This word can be divided into “un” and “happy” They are twomorphemes that contribute to the form and the meaning of the words “unhappy”

The words consist of only one morpheme such as “book”, “like”, etc aresingle morphemes Besides, many words may consist of many morphemes such as

“unhappily” = “un” +”happy” + “ly”, “internationalization” = “inter” + “nation” +

“al” + “ize” + “ation”

2.1.2.2 Parts of sentence

The sentence may be analysed according to the relationships between itscomponents These factors are called parts of the sentence The parts of sentencesinclude subject, verb, object, component and adverbial

- Subject:

Subject generally refers to the origin of the action or the undergoer of thestate shown by the predicate Normally, the subject stands before the verb of thesentence For example, “Peter likes apples”, “peter” stands right before the verb

“like” then it is the subject of the sentence

According to Borjars and Burridge (2010), the clearest way of spotting thesubject of a sentence is to turn the sentence into yes/no question, e.g.:

“He can keep a goldfish alive in a week without food”

may be turned into Yes/no question like:

“Can he keep a goldfish alive in a week without food?”

Here “he” and “can” have changed places and that means that “he” must bethe subject in the first sentence

- Verb:

The verb is a part of the sentence that describes an action or occurrence orindicates a state of being The verb is usually goes after the subject in a sentence.For example, “Her mother in law scolds her so much”, the verb in the sentence is

“scold” that comes after the noun phrase “her mother in law” that functions as thesubject of the sentence

- Object:

The object is the part of the sentence that always indicates the affected things

or people by an action in the sentence There are two types of objects: direct objectand indirect object Direct object is a noun or pronoun that receives the action of averb or shows the result of the action For example, “She broke the vase”, “the

vase” is the objected directly affected by the action in the sentence While indirectobject precedes the direct object and tells to whom or for whom the action of theverb is done and who is receiving the directs object For instance, “She gave a letter

to her boss”, “a letter” is a direct object and “her boss” is the indirect object

- Component:

To a distinguish components and objects of the sentence is usually a difficultthing for many students since they share the same place and function in thesentence; however, the object refers to different thing from what the agent refers to.The component looks like the object; however, it refers to the same thing as subject

Thus, it can come after the verbs like be, become, seem, elect, etc in the sentence

For example, “Martha becomes the head of the institute”, “the head of theinstitute” refers to the subject “Martha”

- Adverbial:

Adverbial is another word or phrase which adds further information to thesentence The adverbials may be such words like yesterday, at home, on his own,etc

For example, “Terry met Joe, his girlfriend in 1998”, 1998 is the addedinformation in the sentence to prove the meaning of the sentence “In 1998” is theadverbial of the sentence

2.1.2.3 Parts of speech

Parts of speech are the different parts of the sentences that may be realized

by various kinds of words or phrases These are the types of parts of speech:

- Nouns:

As it is a common understanding that noun are traditionally known to benames of persons, places, things, and ideas However, in fact it may refer toactivities or events such as a conversation (activity) or a battle (an event), or it canrefer to the abstract notion such as belief, love, etc

Nouns are divided into common noun and proper noun The proper nounrefers to the name of a person, a place like “The King Henry II”, “The Grand

Hotel”, etc The common nouns do not refer to a particular thing Here are somecommon nouns: book, apple, mountains, etc Most nouns are common nouns

There are some nouns that people can count its number such as books, house,etc., these nouns are called count nouns The other nouns can not be counted in acertain number, these nouns are uncountable nouns or mass nouns such as money,water, gas, etc The countable nouns are also contributed by singular nouns andplural nouns Singular noun in the noun in the form of one and it is indicated by thearticle “a” or “an” such as a book, a table Plural nouns contain more than one partsuch as houses, stamps, etc To form the plural nouns, suffixes are used; thesesuffixes are “s” as in “books”, “es” as in “wishes”, “watches” or “boxes”, “ves” as

in “knives”, “leaves” or irregular plural nouns such as people, men, women, feet,teeth, children, mice or sheep

- Verbs:

Verbs are the words of “doing” such as read, play; it also indicates the state

of “being”, “feeling” or “being in relationship to” such as remain, contain, regret,

etc A verb can imply the action or the doing of something or it may be defined as aword which affirms, commands or asks a question The simple form of the verbwithout inflection is called the root of the verb For example, think is the root of theverb “to think”

Verbs can be used in different tenses such as past simple, present simple, etc

or in active or passive voices There are two types of verbs: transitive verbs andintransitive verbs Transitive verbs are the verbs that need object to go after as in

“She is doing her housework”, “do” is a transitive verb because there appears anobject “her housework” after it Intransitive verbs are ones that do not need anobject to go after as in “She is sleeping”; there is no object after the verb “sleep” sothat it is an intransitive verb A verb depending on different sentences may betransitive or intransitive Considering two sentences: “She is eating” and “She iseating some cereal” In the first sentence, “eat” is an intransitive verb but in thesecond sentence, it is a transitive one

- Adjectives:

Adjectives are normally described as the things referred to by nouns orpronouns and they may come before the word they describe They may function as acomplement or be attached to a noun to modify it For example, excited can beconsidered a complement in the sentence “She is excited” And in the sentence “Shelove these great beaches”, “great” is attached to the noun “beach” to modify it

- Adverbs:

Adverb is another part of speech that can be used to modify verbs such as

“quickly” in “He runs speaks English quickly”, “alone” in “I live alone”; modifyadjectives such as “quite” in “He is quite tall”, “rather” in “The quality of theseChina ware is rather good”; modify another adverb such as “quite” in “He runsquite fast”; or modify an entire sentence or situation such as “unfortunately” in

“Unfortunately, the storm destroys all the crops” or “perhaps” in “Perhaps they willcome late”

- Pronouns:

Pronouns usually function as substitutes for nouns or nouns phrases such as

he, him, who, which, these, etc There are different kinds of pronouns such aspersonal pronoun, possessive pronouns, reflective pronouns, indefinite pronouns,etc In different sentences, pronouns may have different functions It may function

as subject (she dislikes any kinds of vegetables), object (We elect him the

president), complement (It’s him), or follow a preposition (We didn’t hear from

him for long).

- Auxiliary verbs:

Auxiliary verb is a part of speech that is used to determine the mood, tense oraspect of another verb or verb phrase Auxiliary verbs are used together with mainverb to give grammatical information and therefore extra information to a sentence.Auxiliary can be attached to main verbs in a verb phrase For example, “He iswatching TV”, “is watching” is the phrase verb built in the form of presentprogressive in which the auxiliary “be” and “ing” are combined and attached to theverb “watch” to make the sentence grammatically correct

- Modal verbs:

Modal verbs are particular type of auxiliary verbs; they express ideas such aspossibility, ability, compulsion, probability or willingness Such modal verbs are

must, can, may, etc The modal verb cannot stand alone as they have to be proved

by another verb going after For example “He can play football very well” Themodal “can” is followed by the verb “play” to prove the meaning of the sentence

- Determiners:

Determiners are items that introduce a noun or a noun phrase They may bethe articles in term of definite such as “the” or indefinite such as “a”, “an” Thedeterminers can also indicate the quantity of the nouns such as “some”, “any”, “all”,etc Some determiners such as the carry no meaning in the sentence; However, itfunctions as a functional word in the sentence to make it grammatically correct.Considering the following sentence: “Margaret came home and put her bag on thetable in the dining room”, the two determiners “the” in this sentence carry nomeaning; however, the sentence is considered wrong if it has lack of thedeterminers Besides, determiner “the” helps to define and particulate the noun after

it such as in this sentence: “Yesterday, I saw a beautiful woman, the woman hasvery long and smooth hair”

- Prepositions:

Preposition is the part of speech that can be used to define time (in, at, on,

before, after, etc.), space (in, at, on, above, under, by, in front of, behind, etc.) or

more abstract relationships (according to, despite, etc.) The prepositions can precede nouns (I got three letters from the postman) or pronouns (Joe is a good

friend of mine)

2.2 Errors

2.2.1 Errors and Mistakes

It is natural to make errors not only in daily life but also in learning All thestudents have errors in the process of learning Making errors is the most naturalthing in the world and it is evidently attached to the human being In the field of

language teaching, error is the problem that any teachers have to face This is thereason why many linguists and pedagogists have tried to work on this matter

A number of experts in linguistics have presented various definitions oferror Among them, Norrish (1987) considers error a systematic deviation, when alearner has not learnt something and consistently gets it wrong Errors can also bedefined as systematic deviations from the norms of language being learned It isclear to see that the phrase “systematic deviation” in these two definitions is a keyword which can be interpreted as the deviation which happens repeatedly

Besides, many other researchers focus on the linguistic forms whenconsidering errors Chaudron (1986) reviews error as linguistic forms or contentthat differed from native speaker norms or facts, and any other behaviors signaled

by the teacher as needing improvement In his view, there are two elements that can

be seen as the errors, they are the linguistic forms or contents that are not delivered

in native ways or the behaviors that seem to need some improvement Additionally,George (1972) defines error as an unwanted form, specifically, a form which aparticular course designer or teacher does not want” and iff native speakers hesitateabout the acceptability of a word or construction it should not be considered anerror

However, many people still make confusion between the term “error” and

“mistake” It can be agreed that a mistake is a non-systematic deviation from thenorms of language A mistake refers to the failures to use the language systemcorrectly caused by some factors such as carelessness, memory lapses, and physicalcondition while error refers to the failure to use the system correctly caused by thelack of the learners’ competence, ignorance of appropriate rule and interference ofthe learners’ mother tongue and the general characteristics of the rule learning

In terms of learning and teaching languages, errors are regarded as moreserious than mistakes as students make errors when they do not know that theymake these errors, which may makes these errors become systematic as studentsmay make these errors later Meanwhile Mistakes are considered less serious than

errors¸ students already knew the theory, yet they suddenly forget or misrememberwhile they are doing their work However, these mistakes can be recognized moreeasily and quickly when the teacher correct the mistakes for the class

In short, it is acknowledged that error is systematic while the mistake is systematic Students make errors again and again as they do not know about theirerrors Thus, errors are unavoidable In contrast, learners can avoid making mistakes

non-by paying more attention when they are writing

2.2.2 Error analysis

Errors are an inevitable feature of learning so that whenever a language islearnt or acquired; people are faced with the problem of errors In fact, errors arepart of learning and reveal the strategies that learners use to learn a language sincethey provide insight into the language learning process

Analyzing errors thus is a very important process of teaching languagebecause by analyzing the errors, people can build up a picture of language whichcauses the learning problems When the problems are understood in the rightperspective remedial measures, it is easier for the teachers to find out the solutions

to help their students overcome obstacles

According to many studies, it is believed that if the teacher teaches well andhelp students drill the patterns of the new language efficiently, there will be noreasons for the learners to make any errors However, students still make errorseven they are taught in an idealistic condition Thus, more and more studies havebeen undertaken to prove that students’ errors show evidence of a system Thelearners try to involve a language system of their own on the basis of exposure theyreceive

According to Stevens (1969), if a regular pattern of errors could be observedand the learners were seen to get progress through this pattern, it will be a sign ofachievement in learning Hence, errors can be seen as a developmental phenomenasupporting evidence to regard the rules and categories used by the learners atparticular time As Corder (1973) says: “by describing and classifying his errors in

linguistic terms, we build up a picture of the features of language which are causinghim learning problems”, the study of errors is very important to help us infer whatthe nature of learners’ knowledge is at that point of time in their learning and whatmore has to be learnt to improve their language knowledge.

In short, the analysis of the learners’ errors is really necessary because it canhelp the teachers know when, what and where their learners need help and it alsowarns them not to interfere too much in their learning process

In Corder (1973), the error analysis process can be carried out in threesuccessive stages, they are:

He also believes that recognition of errors is thus crucially dependent uponcorrect interpretation of the learners’ intentions This is true because even nativespeakers sometimes make the utterances full of slips of the tongue or lapses Thisfact can be acceptable in case of stress, fatigue, etc Thus, the teachers should becareful to consider they are errors or not

Corder classifies two types of utterances Overtly erroneous utterances arethose which appear the mistakes on the surface of the utterances These utterancesare superficially deviant in the form of the language Meanwhile, covertly erroneousutterances are those that transfer the speaker’ intentions wrongly They aresuperficially well formed but not meaning what the learners intended to mean.

The recognition of the errors made by students is an important stage of erroranalyzing process since by recognizing the errors, teachers may give studentssupports appropriately However, recognizing whether an utterance has errors or not

is a difficult job that requires teachers with a lot of experiences and practice

← 2.2.2.2 Description of errors

The description of the errors is the step that tries to show the learners how theyhave failed to realize the intended message It should not be assumed that one learnermay not at different times produce the same error for different reasons This meansthat it should not be supposed that learners take the same route to the same error

However, Corder (1973) thinks that the object of error analysis is to explainerrors linguistically and psychologically in order to help the learners to learn Healso suggests that it is urgent to look for errors that occur repeatedly so that teacherscan observe the rule that the learners may use and try to describe By this way, onlysystematic errors are taken into accounted because they are made repeatedly by thestudents

Description of errors is a very important process to help students realize theirerrors and base on the description, students may know what kind of errors they aremaking and hoe to avoid it Making errors actually is not as serious as notrecognizing it as it can be easier for the learners to correct their errors by the errorsdescription

2.2.2.3 Explanation of errors

Explanation of errors is the step trying to find out the sources of the errors.Each error made due to a certain number of reasons, by studying these causes,teachers may help their students correct from origin

In fact, the same error could be looked at from various points of view Forexample, a learner’s mother tongue has only one way of referring to future time bythe word “sẽ”, while the target language has different ways of referring to the futuretime by “will”, “be going to” Hence, the learner has problems and commits errors.

In this case it is difficult to decide whether the error was caused by mother tongueinterference or because of the confusion of the rules of the target language

Corder (1973) refers to three types of errors These are: 1) transfer errors; 2)analogical errors and 3) teaching-induced errors Selinker (1974) suggests fiveprocesses which are somehow similar to three stages suggested by Corder butincludes strategies of second language learning and strategies of second languagecommunication to explain the nature of errors

← 2.2.3 Classification of errors

According to Brown (1980), the errors that students make when they try todevelop their second language system are the lapses or the slips of the tongue due tothe physical or psychological reasons In the view of the linguists as well as thepedagogists, these errors are not only simple as their surface Each error has its owninternal mechanisms For this reason, they are viewed carefully

Among the researchers who realize the seriousness of the errors, Corder isthe person who tries to focus on the internal mechanisms controlling inside eacherrors and classifies them into two types: system errors and non-system errors

According to him, non-system errors are ones that occur in one’s nativelanguage, Corder calls these "mistakes" and states that they are not significant to theprocess of language learning As they do not belong to a system, they can be self-corrected when the students pay attention to avoid them

Besides, he keeps the term "errors" for the systematic ones, which occur in asecond language He believes that errors are the evidence of the language systemthat the learner is using at a particular point in the course Obviously, the systemerrors are the main source of errors which students always have when they learnsecond or foreign language

Richard (1971) and some other researchers distinguish between interlingualerrors and intralingual errors Obviously, errors are classified differently according

to perspectives On the whole, the most popular classification of written errors thatearns scholars' consensus prevailingly is the division of errors into interlingualerrors and intralingual errors Because, two major factors that contributed to thepresence of errors in students’ written work are interlingual transfer and intralingualtransfer The elaboration of these categories is illustrated as below:

is a significant source for language learners It can be said that interlingual errors arethe incorrect elements under the influence of learners' native language Therefore,interlingual errors are errors which are caused by interference from native language tothe target language they learn So, before someone really masters the concept of theirtarget language they will always use the concept of their native language When ithappens all the time and they do not realize it, it can be called interlingual errors

Interlingual errors may occur at different levels such as transfer ofphonological, morphological, grammatical and lexica-semantic elements of thenative language into the target one

At phonological level, the native language’s phonological system may affectstudents on some making the sounds like “Ɵ” and “ð” These sounds do not appear

in Vietnamese phonological system then Vietnamese English learners would find itdifficult to pronounce them

At morphological level, Vietnamese students may find it hard to rememberthe rules to form plural nouns since in Vietnamese, the form of the noun keepunchanged for both singular and plural forms

At grammatical level, the order of the words in the sentences of Vietnameseand English are different in some structures This is reason why Vietnamesestudents may make errors in making sentences In Vietnamese language system, theadjectives usually stand after the nouns like “một ngôi nhà sang trọng” However,this order is converse in English system; it must be “a luxury house” Here it is clear

to see that the adjective initiates the noun

At lexica-semantic level, there may be a typical example with the verb

“smoke” In Vietnamese language, the accepted word is “hút thuốc”; however,people never say “smoke cigarettes” in English for “smoke” can stand for both

“smoke” and “cigarettes” The interference of the mother tongue is the reason whymany Vietnamese students write “smoke cigarettes” The interlingual transfer is theobstacle for people to learn a new language The level of being affected by nativelanguage differs from person to person

2.2.3.2 Intralingual errors

Brown (1980:173) says that it is clear that intralingual errors or intralingualinterference is the negative transfer of items within the target language, or in otherwords, the incorrect generalization of rules within the target language is a majorfactor in second language learning After learning a second language or a foreignlanguage for a period of time, there may appear some obstacles caused by students’previous experiences and knowledge of target language The structures or itemswithin a language system of the target language may make a conflict or inhibitiondue to faulty generalization, incomplete application of rules, and so on

It is a common sense that interlingual errors are those caused across two ormore different languages, intralingual errors are those caused within one languagesystem However, they are both considered two main types of students’ errors

to refer to the same item, it is the causes that the learners make errors There aredifferent sources of errors as following:

For example,

(1) “She is think that Mary is a good student”

(2) “He can not plays football because his leg broken”

(3) “Do you know where does she live?”

In sentence (1), the students overgeneralize the verb “to be” with the thirdperson singular form “is” In the second sentence, the overgeneralization of the “s”after verb with third person singular make the sentence ungrammatical since theverb “play” go after modal verb “can”, it does not have to be added “s” Sentence(3) is the typical example for overgeneralization of the question structure Thesecond clause should not be in the form of question as the first clause is in the form

of interrogative These sentences can be corrected as followed:

(1) “She thinks that Mary is a good student”

(2) “He can not play football because his leg broken”

(3) “Do you know where she lives?”

2.2.4.2 Oversimplification of rules

This type of errors deal with the cases in which the application of rules tocontexts where the learner does not apply Here the learner fails to observe therestrictions of existing structures

For example:

“He speaks me in Japanese”

“Her sister says me about her boyfriend”

“Lily is chatting her friends”

In these three above sentences, the writers ignore the preposition “to”following the verb This is the reason why students make errors when they makesentences In this case, the sentences must be corrected as follows:

“He speaks to me in Japanese”

“Her sister says to me about her boyfriend”

“Lily is chatting to her friends”

2.2.4.3 Incomplete application of rules

An example of incomplete application of rules can be seen in the questionforms They are used very often not to find out something as they should but as ameans of eliciting questions through a transform exercise

For example, teacher may ask students to make question about the price andstudents may respond: “How much it cost?” Teacher says: “what does she have todo?”, students answer: “She have to do cook the dinner”

2.2.4.4 Teaching transfer

Teaching transfer is sometimes called false concept hypothesized According

to Jurusan Sastra Ingris (2002: 42-50), false concepts hypothesized are somethingdue to poor gradation of teaching items It derives from incorrect comprehending ofdistinction in the target language For example, in the sentence: “He was read abook last night”, the verb “was” is used to infer the tense of the past It isinterpreted to be the marker of the past form

2.2.4.5 Language transfer

As it is stated in the above part, it can be understood that interlingualinterference is the interference of the learner’s first language or mother tongue ontothe process of learning a second language In fact, mother tongue interference is one

of the major causes leading to learner’s committing errors

According to Norrish (1987), learning a language (any language, a nativelanguage or a foreign language) is a matter of habit formation When a learnerlearns a new habit, he is affected and interfered by the old ones In other words,the term "first language interference" is best suitable to describe thisphenomenon

On the other hand, being able to express fully one's ideas in another language

is always a difficult task that requires them to have sufficient knowledge Thus,when learners' second language is not sufficient in expressing themselves, it isprobably that they will rely on their first language to express their ideas Whenpeople do not know how to say something in a foreign language, one possibility is

to use words and structures from their own language and try to make them fit intothe foreign language This is a fact because it is easy to see code switching situation

in many daily conversations Moreover, the interference of mother tongue mayresult from the complication of the structure of the target language as Abbort et al(1981: 230) argues that "wherever the structures of the first language and targetlanguage differed, there would be problems in learning and difficulty inperformance, and that the greater the differences were, the greater the difficultieswould be."

It is clear to see that in the process of learning a target language, the sourcelanguage may cause many interferences on to learners Also, it is undoubtedly thatthe consideration of the contrast and comparison between the two languages willcontribute to the analysis of learners' errors The differences between the languagesystem of Vietnamese and English are manifested in pronunciation, grammaticalrules, lexical meaning, and word order is considered another factor of the

interlingual interference as well Recognizing this fact, it would be a matter to careabout for many teachers teaching foreign language in general and teachers teachingEnglish in particular.

2.2.5 Trend of error analysis

For many years, there have been many researches on the process of firstlanguage acquisition and second language learning After studying about thefindings about first language acquisition being adapted to foreign language learning,

it acknowledged that the process works in the similar way No one can deny the factthat it is inevitable that learners make mistakes and commit errors However, thisprocess can be impeded by realizing the errors and operating them by the givenfeedbacks The process of treating errors is called error analysis Thus, the fielderror analysis becomes a branch of linguistics in this sense Error analysis enablesthe teachers to find out the sources of errors and take pedagogical precautionstoward them

It is the late sixties when error analysis war emerged to demonstrate thatlearners’ errors were not only because of the native language but also they reflectsome universal learning strategies On the other hand, error analysis deals with thelearners’ performance in terms of the cognitive process they that they use torecognize the input receiving from the target language

Keshavars (1997) suggests that the field or error analysis should be dividedinto two main branches: theoretical and applied analysis

Theoretical analysis of errors primarily concerns with the process andstrategies of language learning and the similarities between first and secondlanguage To put it simple, it tries to decode the strategies that learners use whenthey express themselves in the target language such as overgeneralization orsimplification of the rules, etc Additionally, it comes to a conclusion that regardsthe universal of language learning process whether there is an internal syllabus forlearning a second language

Applied analysis of errors mainly concerns with organizing remedial coursesand devising appropriate materials and teaching strategies based on the findings oftheoretical error analysis The applied branch is the studies based on the results ofthe theoretical one and are applied into certain practical situations of teachinglanguage.

CHAPTER III: RESEARCH METHODS

In the previous chapter, the author has analyzed some theoreticalbackgrounds related to the subject of the study In this chapter, she will discussresearch questions, research methodology, participants and settings of the study andprocedure of data collection

3.1 Research questions

By doing this study, the author tries to answer the following questions:

1 What are the most common English grammatical errors committed by the

10th grade students at Nguyen Cong Tru High School?

2 What are the pedagogical recommendations to help students improve theirgrammar?

3.2 Research method

To satisfy the aims that have been set, the author has used differentapproaches: quantitative and qualitative First, she collects the writings from herstudents These writings were then analyzed In the data analysing process, theauthor has applied the theory of three successive stages by Corder (1973) anddeveloped by Ellis (1994: 48) with five steps as follows:

Step 1: Sample collection

In this step, she collects her students’ writing samples in their written tests.Step 2: Error identification

This step deals with finding out the errors made by the students she willidentifies all the errors made by her students in their tests This step may be useful if

a highlight pen is used and underlining can be helpful to distinguish different types

of errors

Step 3: Error classification

All the errors made by the students are classified into different categories

Step 4: Error Explanation

She will explain the errors by establishing the source of the errors andcalculate how often the errors appear

Step 5: Error Evaluation

This is the final step of the data analysing process In this step, she willevaluate the errors step involves tabularizing the errors and draw the conclusion andthink of the suggestions to improve the students’ grammar

3.3 Settings and participants of the study

3.3.1 Settings of the study

After her teaching at Nguyen Cong Tru High School, the author collectssome information about English teaching and learning here There are 9 teachers ofEnglish, most of whom are still young (30 -40 years old) and responsible for theirteaching There is only one teacher who passed the English teaching test inchoosing excellent teachers of Ha Tinh City in 2008

There are three grades: 10, 11 and 12 with 28 classes at Nguyen Cong TruHigh School in the school year of 2010-2011 with 1200 students of which 450students are in the 10th form

3.3.2 Participants of the study

All the students are studying the new text book of English They all havestudied English as a compulsory subject at secondary school for four years and theyhave passed the entrance examination at the beginning of the school year.Therefore, they all know how to write a paragraph The age of the participantsvaries from 15 to 17

This study works on 80 students from class 10B5, 10B6 of which 40 of themare male and 40 are female

In order to get the allowance of copying students’ tests, the researcher askedthe permission from the school’s Head of the managing staff There was no writtenwork of the same students These samples were collected from official tests, sothere is a low risk that students may copy down from the others, the internet or

reference books This ensures that the writing samples collected are students' ownproducts and it would contribute greatly to the reliability of the study.

3.4 Procedure of data collection

The five successive stages are the basis to carry out data analysis This is theprocess of analysing the errors

Step 1: Sample collection

In order to collect the samples for this current research, the author copied 80final writing tests and 80 free writing tests by the students from class 10B5 and10B6

Step 2: Error identification

After collecting students’ writing samples by copying their final test, theauthor starts to find out the errors appearing in the tests In this step, the researcherstudied the acquired data and tried to find out the errors by underlying the errors.Although the author tries her best to work as carefully as possible to identify thecorrect number, it is unavoidable that the number of the errors is relative However,the researcher tried to analyze the data as objective as possible

Step 3: Error classification

In this step, the author will rank the errors found into different categories She will rank the errors made by students into the following ranks:

1 Errors in Verbs

 Errors in subject-verb agreement

 Errors in verb tense

 Errors in verb form

2 Errors in noun endings

 Errors in pluralization

 Errors in adding morphemes

3 Errors in articles

4 Errors in using words

 Errors in lexical choice

5 Errors in sentence structures

Step 4: Error Explanation

In this step, the researcher calculates the errors in order to find out thefrequency of these errors To calculate the frequency of these each error, theresearcher based on the formula of percent

By calculating the frequency of each error, the researcher can identify themost frequent error and the least frequent error made by the students

Step 5: Error calculation

There are various tasks in this step After analysing the errors, the researcherdraws the tables showing the result of the analysis Not only expressing the errorfrequency by the tables and the charts, the author also draws a conclusion based onthe analysis in the form of a brief description

CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS, DISCUSSION AND PEDAGOGICAL

RECOMMENDATIONS

In the earlier chapters, the author has presented the literature review of thestudy and stated the methods that she applies to carry out the research In thischapter, all the errors made by students at grade 10 at Nguyen Cong Tru HighSchool in their final test will be collected and ranked into different categories Thispart also deals with the frequency of occurrence of the error types Ranking theitems in the order of occurrence frequency, the author will begin analyze the datafrom the most frequent errors to the least one

1 Subject-verb agreement errors 30 940 3,2

The table reveals that the numbers of errors that students made are notproportional The types of errors relating to pluralization and verb forms clearlytake the majority of the total number It can be seen that the most errors made arethose relating to pluralization problems by 230 errors counting for 24.5% of thetotal 940 errors that the students made in their free writing The frequency of thetypes of errors as Errors in pluralization, verb form errors, article errors, prepositionerrors, word choice errors, verb tense errors, word order errors, subject-verbagreement, spelling errors and errors in form (punctuation and capitalization) isrespectively 24.5%, 23.2%, 15.5%, 10.2%, 7.9%, 5.7%, 5.2%, 3.2% and 1.1%

It can be seen clearly from these figures that the occurrence frequency oferrors concerning subject-verb agreement problems and spelling is the same Thefrequency of occurrence of these errors problems is 3.2%

Accounting for 218 out of 940 errors made equivalently to 23.2%, errors inverb forms rank second for frequency Verb in English is a complicated field andthere are many differences between the two languages This is the reason why most

of the students make the errors relating to the forms of the verbs

Also, the table shows that the type of errors that appears with the smallestfrequency is the errors in forms Only 10 out of 940 errors were made accountingfor 1.1% of the total number

The following table will show the results of the errors committed by thestudents in their final test:

Items Types of errors No of each

errors

Total number

of errors

Percentage (%)

Table 4.2: Students’ errors in their final writing tests

As is shown from the table above, the frequency of occurrence of the errorsmade by the students are in the order: errors in pluralization, errors in articles, errors

in verb forms, errors in preposition, errors in word choice, errors in verb tense,errors in word orders, errors in subject-verb agreement, errors in spelling and errors

in form respectively to the percentage in the order: 23.5%, 17.8%, 17.7%, 11.1%,9.3%, 7.3%, 5.9%, 2.9%, 2.35 and 2.1%

The statistics from the above table shows that pluralization is still a difficulty

to the students because the percentage of the errors relating to pluralizationproblems is the highest of all the errors committed by the students Also, errorsrelating to verb forms and articles are made at the same number of 17.7% and17.8%

This table will compare the percentage of the errors made by the students in their free writing and their final tests.

Items Type of errors No of

writings

Free writings Final writing tests

No of errors Percentage

No of errors Percentage

agreement errors

3 Verb form errors 80 218/940 23,2 % 145/849 17,1 %

Table 4.3: Comparative data about errors made by students in their free writings

and their final tests

It can be seen easily from the figures shown in the tables that the total of errors

in final writing tests and that in free writing are not the same even though thenumber of writing are the same: 90 papers for each type There are 940 errors infree writings and 849 ones in final writing tests The occurrence frequency of eachtype is different as well It can be seen from the table that although most of theerrors relating to pluralization were made in both free writing and final tests, there is

a slight reduction in the error numbers, 230/940 (24.5%) errors in the free writingwere replaced by 200/849 (23.5%) errors in the final tests The errors relating toverb forms reduces rapidly from 218 accounting for 23.2% in the free writings to

145 errors accounting for 17.1% in the final tests It can be supposed that studentsare more careful in their final tests so that there are fewer errors in their spellingfrom 30/940 (3.7%) errors in free writing to 29/849 (3.4%) errors in the final tests However, this is not true to the rest of the error types It can be seen clearlyfrom these figures that the occurrence frequency of errors concerning verb tenses,articles and word choice, subject-verb agreement, prepositions, word order and

capitalization and punctuation in final writing tests increase and the difference isnearly the same (≈ 1%) except errors in verb tense and word choice (more than 2%).

Also, the table shows that the type of errors that appears with the smallestfrequency is the errors in forms Although there is a slight increase in number, it isconsidered the smallest number of errors with 1.6% in the free writings and 2.1% inthe final tests

However, in order to find out the most common errors committed by thestudents, the researcher has calculated the frequency of each type of errors in bothtypes of samples and this is the result of the calculation:

Items Type of Errors No Of

writings

No of errors Percentage

Table 4.4: The frequency of each type of errors

As it is shown from the above table, the most common type of errors is theerrors in pluralization (24%) This grammatical item is given to the students fromvery first stage of learning English; however, the rules to make singular nouns