ISAIAH YOO (SOGANG UNIVERSITY)

AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF ESSAYS WRITTEN BY THAI EFL STUDENTS : ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC/SPECIFIC PURPOSES

This corpus-based study seeks to analyze error patterns in essays written by Thai EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students. The focus is on identifying and categorizing common errors and categorizing them to inform more effective EFL teaching strategies. Common errors anticipated in the study include misuse of articles, inappropriate preposition usage, and errors in subject-verb agreement, reflective of the unique linguistic challenges faced by Thai learners due to the significant structural differences between Thai and English. The study expects on retrieving essays written by intermediate-level undergraduate learners from different faculties at Chulalongkorn University and Thammasart University, providing an empirical foundation to explore error patterns in a structured and quantifiable manner. In particular, the data collection involves the Thai English Learner Corpus (TLEC) developed by Aroonmanakun (2009), which includes approximately 880,000 words across 2,819 essays at the intermediate level from both universities. Using a robust corpus analysis tool, the study will process these texts to extract error types. This tool enables detailed concordancing, collocation analysis, and keyword identification, facilitating a comprehensive error analysis. Subsequently, the data will be further analyzed through descriptive statistics, including percentage and frequency. By uncovering frequent errors and understanding their underlying causes, this research will contribute to improving English writing proficiency among Thai students, addressing specific errors, refining educational strategies to better meet their learning needs, and developing learning materials tailored for Thai EFL learners.

Supakorn Luksana-ngam is an MA student in the Department of English at Sogang University. She taught English to middle and high school students at Kham Kaen School and at a cram school for two years before receiving a Global Korea Scholarship in 2021. Isaiah WonHo Yoo is Professor in the Department of English Literature & Linguistics at Sogang University. His primary research focuses on how corpus linguistics informs language pedagogy. His publications have appeared in Corpora, TESOL Quarterly, the Journal of Second Language Writing, Linguistic Inquiry, and Applied Linguistics.