A corpus based analysis of English errors of elementary school teachers: A case study of one in Chon Buri, Thailand

Abstract

The quantitative study entitled “ A corpus based analysis of English errors made by elementary school teachers: A case study of one school in Chon Buri, Thailand” aimed to investigate types of errors elementary school teachers in Chon Buri committed when expressing ideas in English writing. Cluster sampling was a technique used to select one of the excellent schools in Chon Buri. This chosen school was qualified “pass with excellence by Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment. All 35 teachers working in this school became participants in this study. An essay test asking participants to express detailed descriptions about their favorite places they had visited during their holidays was given. Participants spent around 40 minutes in a quiet comfortable air-conditioned room completing the task which was later on collected and analyzed by the researcher and an English native speaker. ATLAS Ti version 6.2 was used as the computer software to count, identify, and categorize different types of main errors and sub-errors in their written English. This study found that on average, elementary school teachers could write 46.49 words in 40 minutes or only 1.15 words per minutes. About 461 tokens were found as a total number of error made by primary school teachers and they were grouped into 15 main categories. The spelling error which accounted for 96 tokens (21%) were found as the most error made by the teachers. In other words,on average, teachers made one spelling mistake for every 16 words. Misuse of tenses which accounted for 91 tokens (20%) were found to range as the second most number of error followed by mechanic error which was 63 tokens (14%) discovered, preposition errors which made up 38 tokens (8.2%) showed up, incorrect verb patterns which showed as 34 tokens (7.4%), article error which made up 32 tokens (6.9%) were displayed, unidentified grammatical structures [31 tokens (6.7%)] arose, Incomplete sentences [22 tokens (4.8%)] occurred, wrong use of vocabulary [16 tokens (3.5%)] happened, incorrect word order [13 tokens (2.8%)] appeared, incorrect use of plural form [7 tokens (1.5%)] also occurred, conjunction errors, incorrect part of speech and transliteration made up 5 tokens (1.1%) for each type, and miscellaneous comprised 3 tokens (0.7%). Based on the findings found in this study, the researcher has suggested some recommendations for school teachers, school management teams, Office for National education Standards and Quality Assessment, teacher trainers and educators, and Faculties of Education in Thai universities.