EFL Students’ Writing Errors in Different Text Types: The Interference of the First Language

   EFL Students’ Writing Errors in Different Text Types: The Interference of the First Language

The results revealed that the first language interference errors fell into 16 categories:  

1. verb tense, 
2. word choice, 
3. sentence structure, 
4. article, 
5. preposition, 
6. modal/auxiliary,
7. singular/plural form, 
8. fragment, 
9. verb form, 
10. pronoun, 
11. run-on sentence, 
12. infinitive/gerund, 
13. transition, 
14. subject-verb agreement, 
15. parallel structure, and 
16. comparison structure, 

Respectively, and the number of frequent errors made in each type of written tasks was apparently different. In narration, the five most frequent errors found were verb tense, word choice, sentence structure, preposition, and modal/auxiliary, respectively, while the five most frequent errors in description and comparison/contrast were article, sentence structure, word choice, singular/plural form, and subject-verb agreement, respectively. Interestingly, in the narrative and descriptive paragraphs, comparison structure was found to be the least frequent error, whereas it became the 10th frequent error in comparison/contrast writing. It was apparent that a genre did affect writing errors as different text types required different structural features. It could be concluded that to enhance students’ grammatical and lexical accuracy, a second language (L2) writing teacher should take into consideration L1 interference categories in different genres.

There are some problems in writing narrative. The problem with most guidebooks to writing narrative journalism is that they are written by writers. For examples, James B. Stewart is a terrific prose stylist and can cobble together a narrative structure, but when he tries to explain the process in his book Follow the Story (Simon & Schuster, 1998), he can get lost in his own stories and his own very specific writing method and style. And, of course, the examples are from stories he wrote. Good writing is good writing, but examples do get dusty, especially if you’re facing down a classroom full of students younger than their textbook.

The more expert in narrative such as Hart focuses on structure. After an opening chapter that pokes around some narrative theory and tries to root out why stories resonate so much with readers, Hart dives right into structure, allowing some freedom for writers to develop their own visual representations of structure (he reprints a snail-shaped John McPhee outline), but he does insist that structure be visual. He settles on a narrative arc as his standard and then comes back to it several times throughout the book as he hangs scenes onto that arc.

The ethics of narrative journalism, laying out a sort of continuum of “what’s ok and what’s not ok” to do in narrative writing. He places the blatant fabrications of James Frey clearly at the “not ok” end but puts cleaning up quotations much closer to the other. He deals honestly and openly with the conflicting arguments about reconstructed dialogue and getting inside a character’s head. 

This ethical wrestling serves to intensify the impression of Hart that he gives throughout the book—that of a perceptive, helpful, and friendly editor who can serve as a terrific guide for a beginning or continuing writer of narrative nonfiction.