The frequency of local and global errors in the writing skill of undergraduate ESl learners of pakistan
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Date
2015
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Publisher
University of Management and Technology Lahore
Abstract
To investigate the nature of the writing skill problems of undergraduate learners at local and global levels, one hundred and twenty ESL male learners randomly selected from Government Postgraduate College Samna Abad, Faisalabad were asked to complete three writing skill tasks. In the first task, based on fifth word deletion test in expository and narrative writing, the learners were required to provide the missing cohesive ties and grammatical items. In the second task, the learners’ topic-based discussion was rated by the language experts by focusing on four analytic scoring rubrics such as cohesion, coherence, lexical range and grammatical accuracy. The third task was related to intra-sentential coherence assessment through a paragraph of jumbled sentences and the learners were asked to form it as a unified piece of discourse. The statistical outcomes of the repeated measures regarding local and global errors indicated that the learners’ rate of error frequency in cohesion was (N= 648), in coherence it was (N= 816), in lexical range it was (N= 730) and in grammatical accuracy it was (N=784). The learners made 54% errors in cohesion, 68% errors in coherence, 61% errors in lexical range and 65% errors in grammatical accuracy. Thus Coherence and grammatical accuracy were found most problematic areas in the writing skill of ESL learners. The study suggests changes in the current pedagogical methods, curriculum and syllabus designing.
Description
Supervised by:Professor Rao Jalil Ahmed
Keywords
Local and global errors, M.Phil Thesis