AN INVESTIGATION INTO ORGANIZATION ERRORS IN EFL LEARNERS’ PARAGRAPH WRITING: A CASE IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CENTER IN CAN THO CITY, VIETNAM

Committing errors is an inevitable phenomenon that happens to learners in the process of learning a foreign language, especially in writing skill. For many years, diagnosing what types of errors learners commonly made and why they are prone to committing such errors has become a great concern to language educators and researchers. The present study investigated organization errors in English compositions produced by 60 Vietnamese pre-intermediate learners on one task. The author collected data by writing tests and participant questionnaires. Analyses of the errors and survey data yielded the following main findings: (1) Among the five categories of organization errors, incoherence accounted for the largest percentage, followed by the poor topic sentence, disunity, poor conclusion and no conclusion; (2) There is a significant difference between the two genders in terms of the category of incoherence. Nevertheless, the difference in the other organization error categories between the two groups of participants was insignificant; (3) Several reasons were identified for the errors such as the lack of writing practice and the influence of Vietnamese.  Article visualizations: