Unpacking the grammar in English as a foreign language academic writing: Error patterns and categorization in research thesis proposals

Abstract

This study, through an empirical lens examine the grammatical usage errors in university students’ thesis proposals, primarily focusing on English as a Foreign Language learners. The prime objective is to scrutinize the predominant types of errors and analyze the most common and recurrent patterns in the learners’ advanced academic compositions. In this study, the errors are quantified and classified  utilizing a descriptive quantitative methodology based on a surface taxonomy. Errors are further highlighted relating to misordering, misformation, omission, and addition. Among the 1,754 errors in the analysis of 27 student proposals from a university in Saudi Arabia, the primary problems were addition errors (28%), omission errors (29%), misordering errors (22%), and misformation errors (21%). The outcomes highlighted the need for targeted instructions to assist students in discerning the appropriate use of grammatical features to improve sentence structure.

Keywords: Error analysis, error categorization, surface taxonomy