Common errors in writing journals of the Englishmajor students at Ho Chi Minh city open university

60 Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University – No. 2(14) 2015 – June/2015 
COMMON ERRORS IN WRITING JOURNALS OF THE ENGLISH-
MAJOR STUDENTS AT HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY 
Pham Vu Phi Ho
1
, Pham Ngoc Thuy Duong
2 
1
Ho Chi Minh City Open University 
2 
The National College of Education Ho Chi Minh City 
Email: ho.pham@ou.edu.vn 
(Received: 08/04/2015; Revised: 15/05/2015; Accepted: 19/05/2015) 
ABSTRACT 
Students’ writing problems are always a primary concern of instructors in writing 
classrooms, and to know the common errors which frequently occur on students’ writing papers 
is usually what the writing instructors have conducted in the classrooms. However, no research 
study has been conducted at the Faculty of Foreign languages at HCMC Open University to 
investigate into this aspect. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the common written 
errors on students’ writing journals and to see whether the extensive writing helps enhance 
students’ writing fluency. 115 first year English-major students participated in this study. They 
composed five writing journals every week during the course of 15 weeks. Each student 
composed 62 writing journals in total. The study found that four most common errors frequently 
occur in students’ writing journals are relating to tenses, collocations, spellings, and verb forms. 
Also, the current study confirms that the extensive writing practices effect the students’ writing 
fluency in terms of length of writing. The results of the study help the writing instructors at the 
local setting with the facts of their students’ writing problems in order to improve the writing 
practices in the writing classrooms. Particularly, the finding of this study confirms the effects of 
extensive writing so that the instructors and students could take this issue into their practices 
beyond the classrooms. 
Keywords: writing journals, errors, mistakes, writing practice, and writing fluency. 
1. Introduction 
The importance of English writing is 
becoming increasingly dominant in both 
educational programs and in professional 
writing in non-English dominant countries 
(Leki, 2001). To become a proficient writer is 
a wish of many EFL/ESL students especially 
for those who want to get higher education due 
to regular writing assignments from the 
instructors. In addition, EFL/ESL Writing has 
always been considered an important skill in 
teaching and learning. According to Rao 
(2007), EFL writing is useful in two respects. 
First, it motivates students’ thinking, 
organizing ideas, developing their ability to 
summarize, analyze and criticize. However, 
writing is always a big problem for EFL/ESL 
students in terms language uses, grammatical 
structures, and cultural communication. 
The biggest problem is that Writing is 
more complex which tests a person’s ability to 
use a language and the ability to express ideas 
(Norrish, 1983) and writing requires a person 
to write not only coherently but effectively. 
Homstad and Thorson (1996) state that writing 
in a foreign language is a frustrating and 
difficult activity for students, so the students 
are often reluctant to incorporate into these 
kinds of activities in or outside the classrooms. 
Particularly in a writing activity, language 
 Common Errors In Writing Journals Of The English-Major Students  61 
seems to be the most problematic difficulty for 
L2 writers (second language) due to their 
limited language proficiency or limited 
linguistic knowledge. Silva (1993) and Olsen 
(1999) agree that EFL writers cannot create an 
effective written work due to the inadequacy 
of syntactic and lexical competence. 
According to Wang and Wen (2002), L2 
writers obviously get stuck when writing in the 
target language because their mother tongue 
mainly affects the use of the second language; 
as a result, they may at times combine the 
systems of the two languages in their L2 
writing, which is called “language transfer or 
syntactic transfer”. Moreover, Weigle (2002) 
also states that because of the constraints of 
limited second-language knowledge, the 
students see L2 writing as hampered because 
of the need to focus on language rather than 
content. She claims that it is impossible for L2 
students to write in a second language properly 
without linguistic knowledge regarding 
grammar and vocabulary. In research findings, 
Olsen (1999) and Sattayatham & Honsa (2007) 
found that less proficient learners had a higher 
number of grammatical, orthographic and 
syntactic and lexical errors. 
In terms of error correction, researchers 
have been arguing for the effectiveness of 
error correction due to the phenomenon that 
students keep making the same mistakes even 
after being corrected many times (Semke, 
1984). According to Ferris (1995; 1999), 
errors corrections have great impacts on 
students writing revision. However, according 
to Truscott (1996), grammar correction is 
ineffective and harmful, and should be 
abandoned all together in the writing class. 
Truscott’s findings prove that grammatical 
correction does not work. The students often 
commit to the same mistakes in different 
setting of writing. 
In a case study, Darus and Ching (2009) 
aimed at investigating most common errors in 
essay written in English from 70 Chinese 
students. The study collected 70 essays to 
analyze for 18 types of error. The four most 
errors that the students frequently committed 
to were mechanics, tenses, prepositions, and 
subject-verb agreement. The study also found 
that L1 had great impact on students’ L2 
writing. Similarly, Watcharapunyawong and 
Usaha (2013) analyzed Thai students’ writing 
errors caused by the interference of Thai 
language. 40 2
nd
 year English major students 
composed 120 paragraphs of narrative writing, 
descriptive writing, and comparison & contrast 
writing during the writing course. The study 
revealed that the students frequently 
committed to tenses, word choice, sentence 
structure, article, and preposition. 
Pham Vu Phi Ho (2013) conducted a 
study at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at 
HCMC Open University and found that the 
students had poor writing skills, but they were 
assigned to compose only 4 to 6 writing 
assignments during the semester of 15 weeks. 
There seems to be not enough writing practice 
in terms of extensive writing to improve 
students’ writing fluency. According to 
Homstad and Thorson (1996), one of the ways 
to help L2 students enhance their writing kills 
is to assign them to do extensive writing or 
writing journals. Extensive writing is defined 
as writing practices beyond the regular writing 
activities in the regular writing classrooms. 
Writing journals is viewed as activities to 
conduct extensive writing. The writing journal 
is a place in which students can explore 
various topics and means of expression to 
develop fluency by writing extensively 
without fear of the instructor’s red pen. The 
writing journal focused on the present study 
will provide the researcher with real situations 
when the students use free expressions without 
any control from the instructors/lecturers. 
Therefore, their common mistakes or errors 
will be naturally revealed so that the 
instructors/lecturers might be informed to 
adjust themselves for better training. 
Most studies investigated the students’ 
writing errors in controlled manners such as 
teacher/peer feedback. Few have investigated 
those errors in “real situations” when the 
students use free expressions in their extensive 
writing. Therefore, the present study takes this 
issue into account for deeper investigation. 
This paper investigated a case in an academic 
writing course among the first year students at 
Ho Chi Minh City Open University (HCMC 
62 Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University – No. 2(14) 2015 – June/2015 
OU). The purpose of the current study is an 
attempt to seek for the students common errors 
in writing journals as nature of students’ 
writing problems. In addition to this primary 
goal, the researchers also want to investigate 
whether the extensive writing practices help 
enhance students’ writing fluency. These 
hypotheses will be presented in the research 
questions bellow. 
2. Research questions 
1. What are the common errors that the 
freshmen at HCMC OU frequently 
commit to when they write journals? 
2. Do the writing journals affect 
students’ writing fluency in terms of 
length of writing? 
3. Methodology 
Setting & Participants 
The English-major students at HCMC 
Open University need to take three Writing 
courses during the first and the second year, 
including Writing-1, learning how to compose 
paragraphs, Writing-2, learning how to 
compose short essays, and Writing-3 learning 
how to write essays. Totally, there were seven 
Writing-1 classes (363 students) during the 
second semester of the Academic Year 2011-
2012 of the Faculty of Foreign Languages. 115 
first year students from 3 intact Writing-1 
classes in charged by the researcher/instructor 
participated in the study. The 
researcher/instructor was the only one who 
assigned students to write journals every week 
during this semester. His purpose of assigning 
the students to conduct these activities was to 
improve see if their writing fluency and to get 
the students used to writing in a foreign 
language, English. The researcher/instructor 
also asked the students for collecting their 
writing journals for research analysis. 
Procedure 
In Writing-1, students were assigned to 
write 4 paragraphs during the course as normal 
curriculum. Apart from the 4 paragraphs, in 
order to encourage students to practice their 
writing skills, the instructor assigned the 
students to write journals every week. Each 
student had to compose about 5 writing 
journals every week. The topics for writing 
were selected by the students’ own choice. The 
researcher/instructor asked them to use free 
writing styles in order that they could produce 
any writing on any topic for their journals. The 
purpose of the instructor to assign students to 
write journals every week was to help the first 
year students to get used to writing in a second 
language and to improve their writing fluency. 
This activity was to encourage students to do 
extensive writing with belief (of the instructor) 
to help enhance students writing fluency. The 
researcher/instructor did not provide any 
feedback in terms of grammar mistakes or 
errors committed by the students in their 
writing. However, he checked every week if 
the students completed their duties in these 
kinds of assignments. The student writers were 
announced that their efforts on writing journal 
assignments would receive 5% bonus at the 
end of the semester. The course lasted 45 
periods in 15 weeks. The students wrote their 
journals in their notebooks. At the end of the 
course, they submitted their journal writing to 
the instructor/researcher for data analysis. 
4. Data collection & analysis 
At the end of the course, the 
instructor/researcher collected all the 
notebooks of journals of the students for 
evaluation. The students would receive 5% 
bonus depended on their hard work of the 
journal writing. The purpose of this study was 
not to measure the students’ writing skills in 
the writing paragraph assignments during the 
course. Its purpose was to find the common 
errors in the real context where students had 
free writing expression. They could help the 
researcher discover the “real writing errors” in 
the “real world”. This could help the 
researcher understand the nature of the 
students in writing skills. 
After collecting journal writing of the 
students, their work was retained for use in 
this study. Each journal was analyzed for 
errors and the errors recorded. First, the 
researcher counted words of every journal of 
115 notebooks to know the length of their 
journals. Second, the researcher analyzed 
common errors in their journal writing. 
Common errors were seen as mostly frequent 
errors appeared in the students’ writing. This 
 Common Errors In Writing Journals Of The English-Major Students  63 
analysis was time-consuming. Nine common 
errors were addressed in this study: tenses, 
spellings, prepositions, articles, collocations, 
word forms, verb forms, subject-verb 
agreement, and adjective-noun orders. The 
errors in the students’ writing were analyzed 
as following examples of the coding scheme in 
table 1. 
Table 1. Coding scheme for error analysis 
 Categories Definitions Examples of errors Corrections 
Tenses The relationship between the form 
of the verb and the time of the 
action or state it describes 
(Richards & Schmidt, 2010). 
I studied English for 6 years. I have studied English for 6 
years. 
We didn’t meet since we 
went to HCM city. 
We haven't met since we 
went to HCM city. 
Spellings A way of pronouncing a word 
which is based on its spelling and 
which may differ from the way the 
word is generally pronounced 
(Richards & Schmidt, 2010). 
I alway get up late at week 
end. 
I always get up late at week 
end. 
I can earn more money in the 
city than in the contryside. 
I can earn more money in 
the city than in the 
countryside. 
Prepositions A preposition is a type of a word or 
group of words often placed before 
nouns, pronouns, or gerunds to link 
them grammatically to other words. 
When I listen music, I feel 
interested. 
When I listen to music, I 
feel interested. 
Nothing can escape his eyes. Nothing can escape from 
his eyes. 
Articles A word which is used with a noun, 
and which shows whether the noun 
refers to something definite or 
something indefinite. For example, 
English has two articles: the 
definite article the, and the 
indefinite article a or an (Richards 
& Schmidt, 2010). 
Today I and my sister went to 
supermarket. 
Today I and my sister went 
to the supermarket. 
Accident happened to me last 
week. 
An accident happened to me 
last week. 
Collocations A collocation is a sequence of 
words or terms that co-occur more 
often than would be expected by 
chance. 
They have to do hard to have 
a better life. 
They have to work hard to 
have a better life 
I started to cry when the plane 
flied. 
I started to cry when the 
plane took off. 
Word forms Word forms refer to part of speech. I’m so worry. I’m so worried. 
Today was a bored day. Today was a boring day. 
Verb forms An English verb can be inflected in 
five forms: base form, infinitive 
form, past form, -ing participle and 
-ed participle, which divided into 
two categories: semantic and 
syntactic (Lee & Seneff, 2008). 
I want buy a laptop. I want to buy a laptop. 
We must to do a lot of 
homework. 
We must do a lot of 
homework 
Subject-verb 
agreements 
The inflection of the verb to 
correspond or agree wit ... the students committed to in 
this study, with a total of 2,655 errors of which 
each student involved in 23 errors in their 
journals (M = 23.08, SD = 2.2). Spelling is 
regarded as the third most challenging of 
Vietnamese students. Students commit 
spelling errors easily due to the inconsistence 
between speaking and writing the words in 
English. 
Verb form errors, with 1,964 errors, 
were the fourth most error that the students 
committed to in this study. Each students made 
17 mistakes on this type of errors (M = 17.07, 
SD = 1.5). This type of error might be the 
cause of so many different rules in English 
language compared to Vietnamese language. 
The results of this study bolster most of 
previous research studies. According to Wang 
and Wen (2002), L2 writers obviously get 
stuck when writing in the target language 
because their mother tongue mainly affects the 
use of the second language; as a result, they 
may at times combine the systems of the two 
languages in their L2 writing, which is called 
“language transfer or syntactic transfer”. Bhela 
(1999) also found that the errors caused by the 
L1 were apostrophe, punctuation, spellings, 
and Prepositions. Darus and Ching (2009) 
found that the four most errors that the 
students frequently committed to were 
mechanics, tenses, prepositions, and subject-
verb agreement and also confirmed the 
influences of L1 on students’ L2 writing. In 
addition, El-Sayed (1982) revealed that the 
 Common Errors In Writing Journals Of The English-Major Students  65 
students participated in his study committed to 
errors mostly to verbs, pronouns, articles and 
prepositions and adjectives. Belhhaj (1997) 
found most errors that the students committed 
to were tenses, adjectives, prepositions, and 
articles. Sattayatham & Honsa (2007) 
confirmed that the most frequent errors the 
students frequently committed to were at 
syntactic and lexical levels which led to the 
overgeneralization, incomplete rule 
application, and building of false sentences. 
Watcharapunyawong and Usaha (2013) found 
that the students frequently committed to 
tenses, word choice, sentence structure, article, 
and preposition. 
Most of previous studies found errors on 
prepositions was the third or fourth most 
frequent errors while it was in the fifth most 
errors in this study and in 
Watcharapunyawong and Usaha (2013)’s also. 
Surprisingly, the order of adjectives and nouns 
was the least frequent errors in the current 
study (M = 1.6; D = 0.3) when the Vietnamese 
language (mother tongue) has different orders, 
mostly nouns first, then adjectives. In English, 
this order was seen opposite. The findings of 
the current study set lights for the writing 
lecturers at HCMC Open University who wish 
to know the most common errors of the 
students to show or train them in the 
blackboard (as they usually do) for the 
frequent errors as samples to help students 
avoid these mistakes in their writing practice 
everyday. This indication comes from Ferris 
(2004)’s suggestion that before providing 
comments on students’ papers, it is crucial for 
a writing teacher to be aware of error 
categories frequently found in his/her students’ 
writing. However, the authors of the current 
study did not imply for error corrections on 
these areas in the peer response activities 
because Trustcott (1996) argues that for both 
theoretical and practical reasons, comments on 
errors can expect it to be ineffective and it has 
harmful effects. In addition, Semke (1984) 
states that student progress is enhanced by 
writing practice alone. Corrections do not 
increase writing accuracy, writing fluency, or 
general language proficiency, and they may 
have a negative effect on student attitudes, 
especially when students must make 
corrections by themselves. 
Research question 2: Do the writing 
journals affect students’ writing fluency in 
terms of length of writing? 
To investigate if the writing journals 
affect students’ writing fluency in terms of 
length of writing, we compared the average 
length of the 10 first journals of each student 
to those of the 10 last journals out of 62 
journals of 115 students. The 10 first journals 
(journal 1 to journal 10) were written during 
the first 2 weeks. The 10 last journals (journal 
53 to journal 62) were written during the last 2 
weeks of the course. The selection of the 10 
first and last journals was to calculate the 
relatively average number of words that the 
students composed between the first and the 
last two weeks. The purpose was to see if there 
was any difference of the students’ writing 
fluency in terms of number of words. In order 
to analyze it, first the mean scores were added 
up, then pair sample t-test was run. Table 3 
presents the students’ writing fluency in terms 
of number of words. 
Table 3. Students' writing fluency in terms of number of words 
N1 Mean S.D. N2 Mean S.D. 
Journal 1 83 48 Journal 53 102 54 
Journal 2 79 41 Journal 54 97 48 
Journal 3 80 42 Journal 55 98 43 
Journal 4 84 42 Journal 56 96 48 
Journal 5 88 79 Journal 57 98 44 
66 Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University – No. 2(14) 2015 – June/2015 
N1 Mean S.D. N2 Mean S.D. 
Journal 6 90 58 Journal 58 100 52 
Journal 7 88 51 Journal 59 97 46 
Journal 8 86 45 Journal 60 96 43 
Journal 9 84 42 Journal 61 99 53 
Journal 10 83 37 Journal 62 101 53 
* N1 refers to the first 10 journals 
* N2 refers to the last 10 journals 
* Descriptive statistics 
As can be seen in the table 3, the means 
of journals 1 to 10 were between 79 and 90 
while those of the journals 53 to 62 were 
between 96 and 102. Table 4 presents the 
students’ differences in writing fluency. 
Table 4. Students’ differences in writing fluency Paired Samples Statistics 
 Mean N Std. Deviation 
Std. Error 
Mean 
Pair 1 first 846.83 115.00 352.26 32.85 
last 985.90 115.00 356.35 33.23 
Paired Samples Correlations 
 N Correlation Sig. 
Pair 1 first & last 115 .478 .000 
Paired Samples Test 
Paired Differences 
t df 
Sig. 
(2-tailed) Mean 
Std. 
Deviation 
Std. 
Error 
Mean 
95% Confidence Interval 
of the Difference 
Lower Upper 
Pair 1 first-last -139.07 362.13 33.77 -205.97 -72.17 -4.12 114.00 0.00 
As can be seen from the table 4, the 
mean scores of the students’ first 10 writing 
journals was of 846.83 and that of the last 10 
journals was of 985.90. The correlation was 
of .478. The Sig. (2-tailed) reached at .00. This 
indicates that the students’ writing journals 
affect students’ writing fluency in term the 
numbers of words in their writing. The length 
of their journals improved by numbers of 
journals that the students committed to their 
writing activities. In other words, the more the 
students write, the more fluent in writing skills 
they become. According to Heder and King 
(2012), giving students extensive writing 
during the writing course will help students 
improve their confidence, speed, fluency and 
interest in learning English. Hyland (2002) 
states that teaching writing is a process and the 
instructors should let the students write and 
encourage them to write as much as possible. 
This might help students’ improve their 
writing fluency and quality. 
 Common Errors In Writing Journals Of The English-Major Students  67 
The findings of the present study 
correspond to Luu Trong Tuan (2010) who 
found that journal writing as an extensive 
activity is to foster learners' writing motivation 
and enhance their writing skill as well as to 
build a close bonding between teachers and 
learners. Furthermore, Homstad and Thorson 
(1996) confirm the importance of writing 
journals when stating that weekly writing 
journals strengthen writing skills and may also 
enhance critical thinking and cultural 
interaction. The findings of the present study 
and the literature discussed above indicate that 
the writing journals are beneficial activity and 
should take into account to encourage students 
to writing English. As a saying goes, “practice 
makes perfect”. The writing journal activities 
may bring EFL students no longer frustrating 
and difficult attitudes towards writing a 
foreign language (Homstad & Thorson, 1996). 
Bacha (2002) suggests that the writing 
lecturers should give the opportunities for 
students to practice writing regularly because 
the experience in writing practice was not only 
a very highly motivating basis for developing 
students’ writing skills but also a valuable one 
for students in acquiring necessary academic 
research know-how. 
5. Conclusion 
Firstly, the study reveals the most 
frequent types of errors the students made in 
both lexical errors and syntactic error. The 
results of the study help clarify what the 
students’ learning difficulties are for the 
writing instructors. Secondly, the study also 
indicates that the students’ writing journals 
affect students’ writing fluency. The length of 
their journals improved by numbers of journals 
that the students wrote during course. In other 
words, the more the students write, the more 
fluent in expressing ideas they become. 
Making errors is inevitable in language 
learning process. Clarifying errors keeps the 
teachers informed what aspects need further 
attention in the training process. 
The results of this study highlight certain 
issues regarding teaching and learning writing 
in English as a second/foreign language. 
Teachers/educators in similar situations may 
utilize those results to enhance the teaching 
and learning of L2 writing. Firstly, language 
interference should be taken into consideration 
during writing classes as the use of L1 which 
might affect writing performance in L2. 
Teacher/peer feedback should be applied 
during the writing activities to help students 
learn from each other to enhance writing 
quality. Teachers should offer students 
opportunities for sufficient amount of writing 
practice. 
Although the researcher has made great 
efforts to carry out the study, the study has got 
certain restrictions. Firstly, the study just 
collected papers from 115 students of Writing-
1 courses out of 363 in HCMC Open 
University for error analysis. There should be 
further investigation to most of the students in 
three writing levels such as Writings 1, 2, & 3 
so that the findings will be strengthened for 
generalization. Secondly, the data for analyses 
were journals which were collected from 
students’ writing assigned by only one 
instructor for 3 classes. This seems not to be in 
the normal curriculum. Moreover, the 
instructor didn’t correct students’ journals so 
the quality was not measured. There should be 
research investigating the quality of students 
writing in the control of peer/teacher feedback 
to see if the students’ writing quality improves 
in the extensive writing practice. 
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