Date of Award
4-2019
Degree Type
UG Dissertation (Restricted)
Department
English
First Advisor
Prof. HO Nga Man, Janet
Abstract
The aim of the study was to identify the student participants’ errors at different grammatical levels, to measure the effects of error correction in terms of changes in syntactic complexity and error frequency, and to examine whether error correction leads to facilitation or avoidance of the school’s targeted grammatical forms. The study used a causal-comparative text analysis of ESL writing. 25 Secondary 3 students and one English teacher in a Hong Kong CMI secondary school participated in the research. Two sets of story writing assignments were collected from the students, who were given written feedback for the first assignment before writing the second one.
The findings show that the students produced morpheme- and word-level errors most frequently, in particular inflectional morphemes and closed-class words. Comma splices and punctuation were another two frequent error types. Error correction was effective in helping the students develop syntactic complexity, reduce tense and aspect errors and use relative clauses and passive voice in their writing. The study suggests that teachers selectively correct errors and use other teaching methods simultaneously.
Keywords
corrective feedback, error correction, second language acquisition (SLA), second language (L2) writing, text analysis (casual-comparative)
Language
English
Copyright
The copyright of this dissertation is owned by its author. Any reproduction, adaptation, distribution or dissemination of this thesis without express authorization is strictly prohibited.
Recommended Citation
Hung, T. S. (2019). Error correction in the acquisition of L2 writing: A causal-comparative text analysis of Hong Kong junior secondary school students' ESL writing (UG dissertation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong). Retrieved from https://commons.ln.edu.hk/eng_fyp/71