This corpus-based study investigates lexical richness in English writing by Chinese senior high school students. Lexical uses in 303 compositions were compared across three grades in terms of lexical sophistication, variation, density and errors. Timed compositions were sampled from Writing Corpus of English Learners, and the sample sizes of three…

English is one of the subjects that has been studied at the elementary to secondary level for many years in Indonesia. One area that must be studied is technical writing skills in English. In the technical writing process in English, there are still many mistakes made by students in Indonesia. So it is very necessary to recognize some common…

Errors in writing are unavoidable while students are trying to develop their writing skills. There have been several studies on identifying writing problems or errors in students' writing. It is believed that identifying students' written tasks is an effective tool to explore the difficulties involved in learning language. This helps teachers'…

Although Error Analysis (EA) has been broadly used in Foreign Language and Mother Tongue learning contexts, it has not been applied in the field of engineering and by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students in a systematic way. In this interdisciplinary pilot study, we applied the EA methodology to a wide corpus of…

English teachers, especially those who teach summary writing to students with relatively lower proficiency in English face difficulty in teaching summary writing and while assessing their students' performances. In the classroom context, an analytic rubric is pedagogically more helpful than a holistic rubric because the teacher can confirm the…

In this study, 200 volunteer students who were in Faculty of Education printed free essay compositions and the compositions were evaluated by descriptive statistics and content analysis. Content analysis is to interpret similar data within specific contexts and themes. The students were free to choose their own writing topic. The reason for this…

Writing is considered as a daunting task in second language learning. It is argued by most scholars that this challenge is not only limited to second language speakers of English but even to those who speak English as their first language. Thus, the ability to communicate effectively in English by both native and non-native speakers requires…

This paper attempts to demonstrate the differences in writing between International English Language Testing System (IELTS) bands 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0. An analysis of exemplars provided from the IELTS test makers reveals that IELTS 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0 writers can make a minimum of 206 errors, 96 errors and 35 errors per 1000 words. The following section…

This study aimed to investigate problems facing Palestinian Arab students from Israel who are majoring in teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in developing well-written paragraphs in English. They usually transfer the stylistic features of their first language, Arabic to the target language, English. For example, they tend to write long…

This paper investigated a number of common ungrammatical patterns that were found in Chinese EFL leaners' free writings, in order to find useful pedagogical implications for English grammar teaching in EFL setting, especially in China. The corpus of writing data is examined by the author together with a native English teacher. Our findings suggest…

Writing is a complex skill and one of the most difficult to master. A teacher's weak writing skills may negatively influence their students. Therefore, reinforcing teacher education by first determining pre-service teachers' writing weaknesses is imperative. This mixed-methods error analysis study aims to examine the cohesive errors in the writing…

Nowadays, scientific writers are required not only a thorough knowledge of their subject field, but also a sound command of English as a lingua franca. In this paper, the lexical errors produced in scientific texts written in English by non-native researchers are identified to propose a classification of the categories they contain. This study…

Developmental composition courses serve a sizable and growing number of Generation 1.5 students, or long-term U.S. resident language learners, and it is believed that language challenges may be part of Generation 1.5 writers' difficulty in controlling the academic register. The current study investigates possible similarities and differences…

This research describes a method applied at a U.S. university in a third-year Russian language course designed to facilitate Advanced and Superior second language writing proficiency through the forum of argumentation and debate. Participants had extensive informal language experience living in a Russian-speaking country but comparatively little…

Argues that the context of writing improvement helps explain writing error. Findings imply that undue efforts by teachers to prevent mistakes may hinder improvement. (RAE)