The Study of Errors in Thai Writing of the Second Year Japanese Major Students of Thammasat University

Abstract

The article aims to identify typical errors found in a summarizing task by 74 second-year Japanese majors of Thammasat University. The students were asked to read a 29-page long academic article entitled Japanese Social Structure and summarise in a paragraph. Marking rubrics include the ability to rewrite a paragraph and language use. Findings revealed that students’ writings showed the lack of unity (98.64%), of coherence (85.03%), and of main idea (79.73%). More than a half of the students’ writings demonstrated a moderate-to-extreme lack of main idea. 9.46% of the writings was incomplete. As for language use, the problematic areas encompass word choice, selection of sentence structures, punctuation marks, spacing and the use of idiomatic expressions; they, however, are quantitatively of little importance.