Studies On English Texts Written By Tefl Ma Students : Investigating The Effect Of L1 Interference And L2 Competency

The class I chose to observe was an eighth grade ELA class. There were twenty students in this class, eight of the students were English language learners. The ELL students’ overall WIDA scores ranged from 3.9 to 5.6. A review of the WIDA data indicated that speaking and writing scores for these six students were weaker skill areas in comparison to their overall score, ranging from 3.4 to 4.6.

Error is something that is prominent in our daily lives. It is a natural occurrence from which we as humans tend to learn from. When the question of error in writing is provoked, things are not as simple given the fact that the, “Lack of clarity about errors contradicts what is perhaps the most common belief about error in writing, namely, that errors are simply “wrong”(Lu & Horner 189). Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner are English professors at the University of Louisville, who are also co-authors of Writing Conventions. In this textbook, Lu and Horner define error from many different perspectives.Throughout the chapter pertaining to error, there is supporting evidence to back up each position on what the definition of error is. In the writing,

writing processes and linguistic backgrounds. In order to gain a better understanding of how the writing

For a very long time, people have been studying the differences of writing among different cultures. Native speakers write texts which are very different from the texts written by foreign language writers. The main reason is that each culture has its patterns of thinking and it determines the way that they write. As a result, foreign language students need to learn the patterns of the language and the way that native speakers usually develop their ideas. If you want to make texts in a foreign language, you need to study how people arrange their knowledge.

As a foreign student, English class gave me the opportunity to improve my overall knowledge about the language. Another writing mistake was thinking what I was going to write in Spanish and then try to translate it to English. Nevertheless, this does not work. The grammar and idiom differences would make my writing sound confusing and clumsy. In the future, this could affect my performance as a professional. And since a sloppy writing will most likely reflect on a person's poor vocabulary, I am presently learning to improve my vocabulary by reading frequently since it helps me to be exposing to new words, sentence structures, and styles techniques, which I could use in my future assignments.

As the great Hannah Montana once said in her hit song “Nobody’s Perfect”, “Everybody makes mistakes / Everybody has those days.” These lyrics relate to the fact that, since nobody is perfect, everybody has misunderstandings – this is especially true in a school environment. When thinking about the misunderstandings that can occur in an English class, many people will often think of grammar and writing related misunderstandings, which are fairly common, but some people may not think of other common and rather important misconceptions – like there are no right or wrong answers or that skills learned in an English class can’t be applied to “real life.” It is rather rare for a student to have complete mastery in a subject, and even the most apt students still have room for growth, since they too experience misunderstandings at points; therefore, it is

Furthermore, it is often difficult to identify the fine line between academic English and casual English, driving beginners like myself to write in excessively convoluted manners in a bid to sound more academic. As a result of our confusion over the appropriateness of different language structures, we end up regarding academic writing as a standalone language distinct from the vernacular and try to write exclusively using sophisticated words and complex

The strength reputation of the British education system has brought a lot of international students to study in the UK. Writing in an effective way is one of the important skills that students need to learn. Languages are affected

Error Correction in Second Language Writing: Teachers’ Beliefs, Practices, and Students’ Preferences Victor Albert Francis S. Corpuz Supervisors: Lynette May Annette Patterson Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Education Master of Education (Research) September 2011 Abstract Error correction is perhaps the most widely used method for responding to student writing. W hile various studies have investigated the effectiveness of providing error correction, there has been relatively little research incorporating teachers’ beliefs, practices, and students’ preferences in written error correction . The current study adopted features of an ethnographic research design in order to explore the beliefs and

The article found significant positive effects for both explicit and implicit error correction on students’ texts. The mixed findings about feedback effectiveness concern mainly teacher comments on form. There is less disagreement about the value of feedback on content. The article also found that social feedback on writing processes (i.e., feedback given to a learner by others about his/her writing performance) promotes both

While speaking, people might make mistakes about tenses, grammars or structures, especially for foreigners. The errors would continue to the written language. Hence, in this paper, I will discuss some grammatical errors of three papers from student paper 3, 5 and 10. The types of paper are different from each other, such as journal, summary and critique. Since different paper types have different structures and expressive methods, it is more precise to discover the common mistakes made by students through different essays. The most common grammar mistakes include punctuation, spelling, verbs tenses, capitalization, incomplete sentence.

The ability to communicate through writing has been imperative to meet various needs such as social, professional and academic needs (Mahendran, 2013). However, writing is a difficult and a complicated skill especially for students who are non-native of a particular language, which makes it hard for them to meet the writing needs in academic domains particularly. This difficulty is attributed to the fact that writing comes at last as a skill in terms of its acquirement for both native and second language speakers of the language (Hamp and Heasly, 2006). For the sake of facilitating the acquirement of this important skill, effective and new approaches to teaching are to be incorporated in the classroom practices. One of these approaches is Systemic Functional Linguistics, which views language as a set of systems, each of which offers people choices to express meanings (Bloor & Bloor, 1995).

The present study will try to examine the effects of task type (decision making and personal tasks) on Iranian EFL learners writing fluency. According to Skehan & Foster (1997), in personal task learners need to use information that they know very well which they have already learned in English. They also mentioned that learners need to find solutions to different problems while dealing with a lot of unfamiliar information in their decision-making task. In other words, they deal with different situations in which they need to make logical decisions and they have to support their decisions by giving some logical reasons. (Skehan & Foster, 1997). This study will focus on these two types of task.

Many researchers in the field of error analysis have stressed the significance of errors of second language learners. Corder (1967), for example, in his important article, notes that "they are significant in three different ways. First, to the teacher, in that they show how far towards the goal the learner has progressed. Second, they provide to the researcher evidence of how a language is acquired, what strategies the learner is employing in his learning of a language. Thirdly, they are indisputable to the learner himself because we can regard the making of errors as a device the learner uses in order to learn" (p. 161).One of the most difficult challenges handled by non-native speakers of English is understanding the system of English articles. This study aims at providing a comprehensive account of the types of errors produced by Persian speaking learners of English in their use of articles. Data were collected from 120 sentences produces by Persian speaking learners of English which written in error analysis and interlanguage analysis book by M. Bemani Naeini (1387). Analysis of errors in students’ written samples revealed that while students made a considerable number of errors in their use of articles, omission errors were the most frequent, while substitutions were the least frequent. Additionally, among all types of omission errors identified, the omission of the indefinite article ‘the’ was the most frequent. In sharp contrast, the use of the indefinite article ‘a’

1998; Norrish, 1983; Ellis, 1995; Ziahisseiny, 1999; Keshavarz, 2003, 2006; Darus, 2009). Results of these studies were applied in the second and foreign language teaching and learning. It was assumed that (Corder, 1967, 1971 & 1974) the learners learn the second and foreign language in the same way, to some extent, as the children acquire their first language. While acquiring their first language, children also make a lot of errors and mistakes. Corder made a distinction between the error and mistake (Corder, 1974: 259). The difference is listed below: