Pioneering Past and Bright of Impactful Research and Scholarly Achievements

“EXCELLENCE THROUGH KNOWLEDGE” P A G E 90 “Under Examination”: An Analysis of Students’ Writing Errors at UTech, Jamaica and Implications for the Teaching of English This research examined errors that students who sit the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech, Ja) Proficiency Test in English (PTE) committed in their writing. It comes out of a larger study that investigates students’ overall performance on the PTE, a project driven by the continuous poor performance of students on English Language courses. The study used a corpus of 86 essays chosen using the random stratified sampling method. The corpus was analyzed within an Error Analysis (EA) framework using an EA taxonomy, which allowed us to identify errors and classify them into four large groups – lexical, grammatical, discourse, and ambiguous. The results of the study showed that the majority of errors committed by students belonged to the grammatical category (55.1%), followed by those in the lexical category (31.8%). Ambiguous errors contributed 8.2% of the total, while the remaining 4.9% were discourse errors. The most common grammatical errors belong to the singular/plural, clausal, verb tense, subject/verb agreement, run-on and pronoun sub-categories. In terms of lexical errors, distortions (spelling errors) constitute the largest sub-category. Other frequently occurring lexical errors belong to the collocation, confusion of sense relations and the malapropism sub-categories. These results shed light on the specific language areas that posed the most challenge to students. This has implications for creating effective curricula to address these areas, and also reinforced the need to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) throughout the education system, as the errors committed by these students were consistent with those committed by other second language learners of English across the globe EDUCATION, HUMANITIES& SOCIAL SCIENCES Daidrah Smith & Michelle Stewart-McKoy Faculty of Education and Liberal Studies Editor’s Note: This research was published in the Journal of Arts, Science and Technology, Vol. 10, 2017. Daidrah Smith Michelle Stewart-M c Koy