Pre-Service Teachers’ Errors in Technical Writing: Implications for English Language Teaching in the Philippines

Abstract

This study employed a qualitative-descriptive research design to identify writing errors among 41 third-year English pre-service teachers in the Technical Writing course at one of the state universities in Pampanga, Philippines. The participants are Kapampangan and Tagalog speakers who use English as their second language and are enrolled in the Technical Writing course. The 123-page learner corpus was collected in their Technical Writing class, including letters, emails, reports, and academic essays. This study is anchored on "Interlanguage (IL) theory" by Larry Selinker and followed the error analysis which consists of data collection, error identification, error classification, and error explanation, as outlined by Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005). The writing errors were classified using Corder’s linguistic levels, including graphological, lexico-semantic, and grammatical levels. Findings revealed that the grammatical level has the highest percentage of errors compared to the graphological and lexico-semantics levels. At the grammatical level, verb form, verb tense, and subject-verb agreement were prominent errors found at this level. Meanwhile, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and word choice errors were found under graphological and lexico-semantics errors. Moreover, emphasis on grammatical instruction, corrective feedback, and application of corpus linguistic approach in language teaching were implications drawn in this study. Therefore, this paper recommends designing intervention programs and instructional materials that target students' crucial grammatical areas. Teachers are encouraged to employ different teaching strategies and provide timely feedback to students. Curriculum developers must review the program's courses and should give emphasis on grammar courses.