ERROR ANALYSIS: INVESTIGATING THE PARAGRAPH WRITING OF ESL MALAYSIAN LEARNERS

Abstract

The study investigates an impromptu writing task administered to diploma students studying in one of the technical universities on the East Coast of Malaysia. In particular, it identifies their errors in writing a one-paragraph essay, the kind of errors students made in completing the task, and the least errors students made in writing the one-paragraph. The samples were 48 students undergoing Preliminary Semester taking English as one of the subjects in the particular semester. The study found that students made errors to a certain degree in using articles, tenses, and subject-verb-agreement (SVA), to name a few in the current study. More specifically, the highest number of errors students made were in tenses, SVA, and word choices, while the least errors were in possessive and attributive structures, gerunds, and infinitives. The study implied that assigning students impromptu writing contributed to their performance errors. Despite their low vocabulary knowledge, it also made them less expressive when writing in the condition.