Errors made by First-year Seinan Gakuin University Students

Abstract

This is a pilot study in preparation for a larger-scale survey to be carried out at the start of the 2011 school year.A class of fifty first-year students from the Education faculty were asked to write self-introduction,first in Japanese and then to re-write them in English.They were asked to use natural, colloquial language and to avoid formality.Twenty English-version manuscripts were chosen at random for the purposes of the study. These were scrutinised and all errors of vocabulary, article use, verb form and tense, singular/plural forms, preposition use , conjunction use, word order, adverb useand possessive use were recorded. The largest single group of errors was article use, although verb form and verb tense formed a larger group if counted together as "verb errors". The adverb use group contained the fewest errors. From a practical point of view, the study is encouraging in the main: errors that actually affected the reader’s comprehension were minimal (only two out of a total of 254), but persistent omission of articles and verb tense errors are evidence of deeply-ingrained problems whichi, if students are hoping to reach a reasonable level of fluency, need to be addressed.