VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY - HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES PHAN THỊ MINH TUYỀN COMMON ERRORS IN THE USE OF ENGLISH ARTICLES BY VIETNAMESE THIRD-YEAR ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS AT AN GIANG UNIVERSITY M. THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN TESOL Supervisor Assoc. ĐINH ĐIỀN HO CHI MINH CITY, 2010 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: COMMON ERRORS IN THE USE OF ENGLISH ARTICLES BY VIETNAMESE THIRD-YEAR ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS AT AN GIANG UNIVERSITY in terms of the statement of Requirements for theses in Master’s Programs issued by the Higher Degree Committee. This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other institution.
Ho Chi Minh City, 2010 PHAN THỊ MINH TUYỀN RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS I hereby state that I, PHAN THỊ MINH TUYỀN, being the candidate for the degree of Master of Arts (TESOL), accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library. In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of theses. Ho Chi Minh City, 2010 PHAN THỊ MINH TUYỀN ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to a number of people for helping to make this MA thesis possible. First and foremost, my deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor, Associate Professor Dr.
Dinh Dien for his insightful comments, invaluable suggestions and a great encouragement during the process I conducted the thesis. I would also like to express my special thanks to Dr. To Minh Thanh, my teacher at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, for her useful suggestions on my thesis proposal. Next, my appreciation is also extended to the Vietnamese teachers and students who participated in my study.
Their help is highly appreciated. I would also like to thank the English Department of An Giang University for providing the most favorable conditions which made my study possible. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family and friends for their great support and willing assistance in completing this work. ABSTRACT This study was intended to investigate common errors in the use of English articles made by the third-year English major students at An Giang University in order to enhance the effectiveness of EFL teaching and learning in Vietnam in general and teaching and learning English article system in particular.
The participants in the study consisted of 44 third-year English major students at An Giang University. The data were collected via writing essays which aimed to identify common article errors, determine the frequency of the article errors in comparison with other types of errors. A fill-in-the-blank test was also employed to get more information about the particular types of article errors made and explain the reasons which the students finally arrived at their choices of articles. In addition, a pretest-posttest comparison group design was conducted to confirm the effectiveness of using corpus-based analysis in helping students overcome their problems of acquiring the English articles.
Both quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed to answer three research questions concerning three areas: (1) common article errors in the writing essays made by the Vietnamese third- year English-major students at AGU, (2) difficulties of acquiring the semantic notions of the English articles, and (3) the effectiveness of applying corpus-based analysis in helping students overcome their problems. The findings showed that the English majors made different types of errors and among them the English articles were found their most concerning problems. The students tended to make more errors relating contextual choices such as unique types, maximal instances, and actual instances, non-definite actual instances, and specificity with definite and count with non-count nouns. The study also found out the effectiveness of teaching and learning the English articles with the use of corpus-based analysis.
The results showed that the treatment group did better the control group after the experiment, especially in using zero and zero in maximal set environments. These findings suggested that Vietnamese EFL learners, especially learners at high proficiency level, needed to be equipped with grammatical competence, particularly the English articles in order to be confident and become professional writers. LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1 COBUILD list of the ten most frequent words in English .2 Percentage of occurrence of the articles in the five genres .1 Quirk et al.’s classification of nouns .1 Types and descriptions of errors .2 Frequency of different categories of errors in essays .3 Environments for the occurrence of the articles .7 Group performance at six NP environments in Post Test 1 .8 Group performance at six NP environments in Post Test 2. 44 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Main entries for agree from the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (CD-ROM 2003).
20 Figure 2 Sample of concordance lines for agree from the PolyU Language Bank Concordancer. 20 TABLE OF CONTENTS Certificate of originality. i Retention and use of the thesis. iv List of tables.
vi List of figures. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. Background to the Study. Statement of Purpose.
Scope of the Study. Significance of the Study. The participants of the Study. Data collection instruments.
Procedures of the Study. Overview of the Study. 8 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. Definition of articles.
Types of articles. Classes of Nouns. Classification of nouns proposed by Quirk at al (1985). Classification of nouns proposed by Langacker (1991).
The suggested classification of the article environments. Acquisition of the English articles by Vietnamese learners. Corpora and the application of corpus-based analyses in language teaching and learning. What is a corpus?.
A corpus is a principled collection of texts. A corpus is a collection of electronic texts. A corpus is available for qualitative and quantitative analysis. Which corpus, what for and what size?.
Overview of existing corpora. Types of corpora. Corpus use in Vietnam. Applying corpus-based analyses to teaching.
24 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. Research questions and hypotheses. Data collection instruments. The writing essay.
The fill in the blank test. A pretest-posttest comparison group design. 32 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. Data analysis and results of the writing essay.
Classification of article errors and other type of errors. Data analysis and results of the fill in the blank test. Some explanations relating to zero vs. Discussion about causes of errors.
Uniquely identified instance. Data results of the pretest-posttest group design. 42 CHAPTER 5: SUMMARY AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS. Summary of the findings.
Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further research. 58 Appendix 1A Writing task sample. 59 Appendix 1B A graded essay.
60 Appendix 2 Article error analysis test. 61 Appendix 3 Pretest 1 on the English articles. 65 Appendix 4 Pretest 2 on the English articles. 68 Appendix 5 Post-test 1 on the English articles.
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