서강대학교

초록/요약

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the major error types observed in Korean advanced EFL students’ writings and compare them with the errors of ESL students. To that end, the present study collected writing assignments from first and second-grade students enrolled in a foreign language high school in Incheon and analyzed their writing according to Ferris’ (2002) 15 types of errors. A total of 584 EFL students’ essays were analyzed based on Ferris’ (2002) criteria. The results showed that advanced EFL students made the most number of errors in mechanics (29.6%), followed by errors on morphological nouns (20.25%), syntactic errors (19.3%), lexical errors (16.6%), and morphological verb errors (14.25%). To be more specific, the most frequent errors occurred in the use of punctuation (26.21%); the second and third highest percentage of their errors were in their use of articles/determiners (15.16%) and sentence structures (11.61%); and lastly, pronoun errors (1.09%). When the EFL students’ errors on their writing were examined according to their year standing (i.e., 1st year or 2nd year of high school) and their writing abilities (high vs. low), there was almost no difference between those four groups: The most frequent errors were observed to be punctuation errors, except for the second-year students, who made the biggest number of errors in their use of articles/determiners. However, given that the second-most frequent errors were in the use of punctuation, there was only a small gap between these two error types. In comparing the common ESL students’ errors to those of the EFL students’, there were some differences between the two student groups. The former showed more problems in sentence structure (22.5%), word choice (11.5%), and verb tense (10.9%) in their academic writing while the latter struggled with other types of errors such as punctuation, articles/determiners, and sentence structure. With respect to these differences, first language (L1) interference could be considered as one of the main reasons, and secondly, their language learning environments. These current results show that the errors produced in the use of articles/determiners and fragments are some of the classic examples of L1 interference. Among them, it appears that the frequency of fragment errors can be more easily reduced than errors on articles and determiners. This is because the former mostly occurred due to the students’ misunderstanding on the use of subordinating conjunction ‘because’ or coordinating conjunctions ‘and, but, so’, whereas the latter appeared to be more difficult to master because it does not exist in Korean. The findings of this study suggest that in order to increase advanced EFL students’ writing abilities, teachers should regard the instruction of punctuations and conjunctions as the foremost task since students at higher proficiency levels are likely to reduce the frequency of both errors when they are pointed out by teachers’ feedback (Brown, 1994; Ferris, 2006; Lee, 2009).