ministry of education and training vinh university nguyễn thị thu hoài An analysis of common grammatical ERRORS in English BY 10th GRADERS AND SOME PEDAGOGICAL RECOMMENDATIONS ( Phân tích lỗi ngữ pháp tiếng Anh thường gặp học sinh lớp 10 số đề xuất sư phạm) MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION Vinh, 2011 DECLARATION The thesis is the study of my own research and the substance of the thesis has wholly or in part submitted for a degree to any other universities or institutions Vinh, November 2011 Nguyễn Thị Thu Hoài ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To complete this thesis, I am in debt to many people who have helped me to fulfill the work Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Mrs Nguyen Thi Van Lam, for her useful consultancy and expert advice During the time this assignment was implemented, she was the great teacher to give me many recommendations to my writings to help me to edit the draft Secondly, I would like to thanks all the lecturers from the Department of Foreign Languages, Vinh University who have given me many helpful and interesting lectures which evoke the inspiration to me to carry out this work Finally, my thanks go to my classmates as well as my family for their assistance during the time I implemented this work ABSTRACT Nowadays, English is one of the compulsory subjects that are taught at any schools from primary school to university However, teaching English to upper secondary students has long been a controversial issue This research investigates the errors made by 10th form students at Nguyen Cong Tru High School and to find out the sources for those errors as well as to give some pedagogical recommendations to the teachers and students The thesis is divided into chapters: Chapter I presents the rationale, aims, methods, scope and organization of the paper Chapter II presents the theoretical background of the thesis that the author bases on to implement the paper In chapter III the author describes the methods that she bases on to conduct the research In this paper, she specially applies the method of making surveys to collect the statistics from the students Chapter IV is to analyze the data collected from the surveys All the information collected from the students’ papers are put into consideration and proceeded in this chapter Chapter V is very important in terms of giving out the pedagogical recommendations for better studying and teaching Besides, the suggestions for further research are also given to help later studies easier to research TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DECLARATION i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Rationale of the study .3 Aims of the study .4 Research questions 4 Scope of the study Methods of the study .5 Design of the study CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW .6 2.1 Grammar 2.1.1 Definition 2.1.2 Grammatical terms 2.2 Errors 13 2.2.1 Errors and Mistakes 13 2.2.2 Error analysis 15 2.2.3 Classification of errors 18 2.2.4 Sources of errors 21 2.2.5 Trend of error analysis 24 CHAPTER III: RESEARCH METHODODOLOGY 26 3.1 Research questions 26 3.2 Research method 26 3.3 Settings and participants of the study 27 3.3.1 Settings for the study 27 3.3.2 Participants of the study 27 3.4 Procedure of data collection 28 CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS, DISCUSSION AND PEDAGOGICAL RECOMMENDATIONS 30 4.1 Findings 30 4.2 Discussion 35 4.2.1 The frequency of errors .35 4.2.2 The most common errors 37 4.2.3 The causes of errors 47 4.3 Recommendations 53 4.3.1 Recommendations for presentation .53 4.3.2 Practice activities 58 4.3.4 Recommendations for giving feedback .63 CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION .66 5.1 Recapitulation 66 5.2 Suggestions for further research .67 REFERENCES 68 APPENDIX CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION Rationale of the study Today, English has become one of the most important languages to communicate from country to country It is the common language to address the global issues such as environment, politics, etc Besides, it is the language to be used in the international contracts, agreements, etc Along with the development of the society, English has shown its significance all over the world Today, people focus on learning this language with different purposes such as promotion in job, travelling the world, etc For whatever purposes they have, English is the most useful means to achieve the goals People can feel the power of the language as it enters into every field of life such as politics, tourism, economics, culture, science, etc As the demand of the real life, it is necessary for people in the whole world especially one of the developing countries like Vietnam to learn English In addition, as a teacher at high school, the author finds herself stuck to teaching grammar to the students Thus, teaching grammar can catch her interest in terms of experience and hobby However, the traditional teaching of English grammar is deductive, hindering the students’ communication skills How to teach English grammar communicatively is the question which urges her to choose the topic about the field of grammar Besides, the author finds that her students make a lot of grammatical mistakes in their writing From the reality of teaching and the enthusiasm to teaching career, she wants to make some contributions to the improvement of the students especially in writing tests It is common knowledge that people always have errors That is the reason why there exists a famous saying: “to error is human” This fact is completely true for the students, although they have learned English grammar again and again They still have errors while doing tests Starting from the recognition of the importance of addressing the problems with students’ common errors, the author focuses on finding the typical errors students always make in their writings and suggesting some solutions to help students learn English grammar in particular and English in general better For the above reasons, the author decides to choose the topic: “An analysis of common grammatical English errors by the 10th graders at high school and some pedagogical recommendations” with the hope to make a small contribution to the improvement of the students’ grammar Aims of the study By working on this topic, the author aims to: - Investigate the common grammatical English errors committed by the 10th grade students at Nguyen Cong Tru High School in their writing and analyze these errors - Suggest some solutions to help students avoid grammatical errors and improve the linguistic accuracy in their writing Research questions To fully achieve the aims set forth above, the author tries to answer the following questions: - What are the common grammatical English errors committed by the 10th graders at Nguyen Cong Tru High School? - What are the suggested activities to help the students avoid these errors as well as learn grammar better? Scope of the study It has been acknowledged that grammar is a huge field that contains many subfields However, due to the limitation of time and knowledge, as the researcher of this study the author tries her best to fulfil the study of the common grammatical English errors made by the10th grade students at Nguyen Cong Tru High School She finds that it is beyond her reach to study the errors of all four skills so she only focuses on working with the errors in the written work Within the frame of this study, she also provides some suggestions to improve grammar teaching and learning at Nguyen Cong Tru High School Methods of the study For the sake of the teaching and learning of English, as this study is carried out, the author has applied the two methods: quantitative and qualitative Design of the study The thesis consists of main chapters Chapter I, Introduction, deals with the author’s reasons for choosing the topic of the study, the aims, scope, research methods and the design of the study Chapter II, entitled Literature Review, provides an overview on the theoretical background and the analysis of the errors Chapter III is about the research methods in which the research questions, research approach, research instrument, data collection, participants and context of the study and procedure of investigation are given Chapter IV, “Findings and discussions”, analyzes the results of the questionnaires and gives the assessment on the common errors made by the 10th graders at Nguyen Cong Tru High School This chapter also provides some suggested solutions to help students avoid these common errors and improve their writing skill Chapter V, “Conclusion” is the summary of the main points presented in the study The study ends with the “References” which lists all the materials and sources of the information used in the study and the “Appendix” CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter, Literature Review, will present the previous studies related to the errors analysis in the context of second language teaching It will then focus on the issues related to errors analysis in second language acquisition Classification and sources of errors are two main issues which will be carefully discussed in the review Finally, a summary of the chapter will conclude the literature review 2.1 Grammar 2.1.1 Definition Starting to learn a language, people start to learn its grammar Students have learned English grammar since they were children This is an aspect catching many linguists’ attention Thus, there are different understandings as well as definitions of this term Grammar is defined by Ur (1995: 75) as the ways words are put together to make correct sentences This definition, following his idea, is the oversimplification of the term grammar This term is used to decide whether a given sentence is correct or not For example, “She is an actress” is correct while “She is a actress”, “She an actress” or “She is actress” are not grammatically correct The term “grammatical” can be applied for the units that are smaller than sentences such as phrases or single words For instance, “a beautiful girl” is correct but “a girl beautiful” is not a correct one Considering this term to single word such as the verb “buy” in the past of “bought”, if it is written as “buyed”, this is not grammatically accepted Furthermore, the minimal components to be combined may not be the whole word, it can be a part of the word such as the prefixes or suffixes For example, the suffix “ed” indicates the form of the past tense of the regular verbs and the suffix “s” can be understood as a device to recognize the plural form of the nouns By adding sub-word components initially or preceding the stems may change the spelling or pronunciation in different contexts 10 ... topic: ? ?An analysis of common grammatical English errors by the 1 0th graders at high school and some pedagogical recommendations? ?? with the hope to make a small contribution to the improvement of the... only in daily life but also in learning All the students have errors in the process of learning Making errors is the most natural thing in the world and it is evidently attached to the human being... language since they provide insight into the language learning process Analyzing errors thus is a very important process of teaching language because by analyzing the errors, people can build