Grammatical Errors Made By the Eleventh Grade of Thai Students in Writing Self-Introduction

The Preliminary study done by the researcherthrough an unstructured interview and classroom observation in the eleventh-grade students of Eakkapapsasanawich Islamic School in Thailand shows that the students have difficulties in writing. During the observation, after taking some samples of the student’s writing randomly, the researcher found errors in their writing, especially in grammar. Hence, this study aims to analyze the common types of grammatical errors and sources of errors made by the eleventh grade of Thai students in writing self-introduction. This study is descriptive qualitative research and the procedure of error analysis used was adapted from Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005). The researcher used blueprint or writing prompt as the instrument to collect the data. The data were a self-introduction written by forty-three of the eleventh-grade students. Afterwards, the data were collected, identified, and then classified based on Azar’s (1989). After analyzing each type of errors, the researcher analyzed the possible causes of error based on sources of error proposed by Brown (2007). The result showed there were 826 errors found in the students’ writing of self-introduction consisting of verb tense (148 errors or 17.91%), punctuation (144 errors or 17.43%), add a word (109 errors or 13.19%), capitalization (89 errors or 10.77%), spelling (85 errors or 10.29%), incomplete sentence (70 errors or 8.47%), singular-plural (46 errors or 5.57%), word order ( 38 errors or 4.60%), omit a word (32 errors or 3.87%), word form (25 errors or 3.03%%), word choice (21 errors or 2.54%), article (12 errors or 1.50%), run-on sentence (5 errors or 0.60%), and meaning not clear (2 errors or 0.24 %). The errors are caused by two main sources of error which are interlingual transfer and intralingual transfer. It can be concluded that grammar was found as the problem for Thai students as EFL students. So, the researcher suggests the teachers to implement a suitable strategy to improve the students' writing and make a treatment called "grammar clinic" in which the students could ask about their problems in writing especially in grammar. Therefore, for future researchers, the result of this study can be used as reference to conduct similar studies with different subjects or levels of the improvement of EFL students’ writing competence