English Writing Errors in the Written Tasks of Thai Employees Working in a Thai Bank and the Impact of Errors on the Bank’s Business

Abstract This study was conducted to explore the errors made in written tasks produced by Thai employees working in the Thai banking sector, using the 15 types of errors established by Ngangbam (2016). In addition, the impact of those errors on the banking business were also investigated. The participants of this study included: (a) bank employees and (b) bank supervisors. Four instruments were used to obtain the data: (a) a demographic survey for bank employees, (b) written tasks produced by employees, (c) a demographic survey for bank supervisors, and (d) a semi-structured interview for bank supervisors. The results revealed that the most frequently found error was punctuation at one 193 errors, followed by the use of verbs, nouns, prepositions, articles, syntax, lexicon, pronouns, capitalization, spelling, sentence fragment, adverbs, conjunction, subject omission, and adjectives, respectively. The impact of the most frequently made errors of the first rank, which include punctuation, impact on the banking industry in terms of the professionalism of employees and the recruitment procedures of the bank. Furthermore, the other ranks of the errors also had an impact on the business of the bank in terms of the capability of employees to communicate with customers professionally, including the impact on the reputation and reliability of the bank. However, the impact of the most performed errors did not have a critical impact as remarked upon by the bank supervisors. Such errors of misinterpretation and delivered information can have more of an impact to the image of the bank, as well as image, reliability, loss of customers, and ultimately loss of profits. Keywords : Writing Skills, Writing Errors, English Use in the Bank Business, Impact of Writing Error