Investigation into Common Errors in English Writing among Non-Academic Staff at a Malaysian Public University

The Malaysian government has long recognized the significance of mastering the English language among its citizenry. The government has planned, and subsequently, implemented many policies to ensure Malaysians master the English language. Although civil servants have a strong desire to master the English language to perform their duties more efficiently, poor English communication skills have become a major concern in this regard. Therefore, this research aims to investigate common errors in writing the English language among non-academic staff at Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA), a public university in Malaysia. The study employed an Error Analysis approach by conducting document analysis where every respondent was required to write a paragraph in the English language in about 150-200 words on the topic“My greatest challenge as a UniSZA officer”. The findings revealed that a sizeable number of non-academic staff committed different types of errors in writing the English language, including errors related to subject-verb agreement, passive voice, plurality, choice of word, omission of word, use of article, tense sequence, word ordering, gerund, addition of word/redundancy, and comparison of adjective. It was observed that lack of linguistic skills, lack of exposure, and inadequate practices in written English were the main factors contributing to the English writing errors among the non-academic staff. These findings could help the university management to develop appropriate programs that can assist the non-academic staff to develop English writing competence. However, this study is limited to English writing errors. Further research may focus on other language skills such as speaking and listening.

Investigation into Common Errors in English Writing among Non-Academic Staff at a Malaysian Public University

The Malaysian government has long recognized the significance of mastering the English language among its citizenry. The government has planned, and subsequently, implemented many policies to ensure Malaysians master the English language. Although civil servants have a strong desire to master the English language to perform their duties more efficiently, poor English communication skills have become a major concern in this regard. Therefore, this research aims to investigate common errors in writing the English language among non-academic staff at Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA), a public university in Malaysia. The study employed an Error Analysis approach by conducting document analysis where every respondent was required to write a paragraph in the English language in about 150-200 words on the topic“My greatest challenge as a UniSZA officer”. The findings revealed that a sizeable number of non-academic staff committed different types of errors in writing the English language, including errors related to subject-verb agreement, passive voice, plurality, choice of word, omission of word, use of article, tense sequence, word ordering, gerund, addition of word/redundancy, and comparison of adjective. It was observed that lack of linguistic skills, lack of exposure, and inadequate practices in written English were the main factors contributing to the English writing errors among the non-academic staff. These findings could help the university management to develop appropriate programs that can assist the non-academic staff to develop English writing competence. However, this study is limited to English writing errors. Further research may focus on other language skills such as speaking and listening.

Effect of Categorizing EFL Shaqra University Students' Writing Errors on Writing Improvement

This paper aims at using a strategy of categorizing EFL Shaqra University students' writing errors and identifying its effect in improving students' writing. The study hypothesized that categorizing students' errors into main headings related to the types of error, frequencies of error, examples of errors, and causes of errors will provide precise insight into the nature of students' errors. Moreover, providing students with models to read and extract the difficult vocabularies from them, understanding their meanings, and using them in their writing will improve students' writing. Hence, the researcher gave 65 female students a title to write about in lecture number one as a pre-test. The title was "women driving in Saudi Arabia", and in lecture number eleven, she gave them a post-tester in the same title after applying the hypothesized teaching strategy. The findings of students' essay analysis in the pre-test proved that students had many grammatical and lexical mistakes but in the post-test the students writing improved significantly in terms of style, diction, developing ideas, spelling, and punctuation. Even their errors decreased from 936 errors in the pre-test to 57 errors in the post-test which indicates the success of the teaching strategy adopted by the researcher. Accordingly, the researcher recommended that: firstly, instructors should categorize their students' writing errors to have a clear insight into the nature of their students' errors hence specifying much time in explaining the areas of students' weaknesses. Secondly, instructors should provide students with a well-written model to read; and then ask them to criticize those reading models. The students will learn through criticizing and imitating the style of reading models. Moreover, the instructors of Shaqraa should specify much time explaining morphology since it was the branch that the students make many errors in it.

Analisis Kesalahan Berbahasa pada Tataran Morfologi dan Ejaan Majalah Awalita SMAN 1 Talun sebagai Upaya Pembelajaran Bahasa Indonesia

This study aims to describe various forms of language errors in morphology and spelling in the AWALITA magazine of SMA Negeri 1 Talun. Qualitative descriptive research method is the method used in this study. In this study, several language errors were found, namely (1) morphological level errors, (2) spelling level errors, (3) writing errors in the preposition di-. With this research, it is hoped that it can be used as an evaluation material in magazine linguistic writing, especially in the field of morphology.Penelitian ini memiliki tujuan untuk mendeskripsikan berbagai bentuk kesalahan berbahasa bidang morfologi dan ejaan pada majalah AWALITA SMA Negeri 1 Talun. Metode penelitian deskriptif kualitatif merupakan metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini. Dalam penelitian ini ditemukan beberapa kesalahan berbahasa diantaranya, yaitu (1) Kesalahan tataran morfologi, (2) Kesalahan tataran ejaan, (3) Kesalahan penulisan preposisi di-. Dengan adanya penelitian ini diharapkan dapat dijadikan bahan evaluasi dalam penulisan kebahasaan majalah khususnya pada bidang morfologi.

'GRAMMARLY' AS A TEACHERS' ALTERNATIVE IN EVALUATING NON -EFL STUDENTS WRITINGS

In evaluating students’ EFL writing, lecturers nowadays can implement corrective evaluation by using an online automatic software. Grammarly is automated online software that is comonly used in EFL writing classes. It is an internet proofreading service that evaluates the correctness grammarl, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary as well as detects plagiarism. This paper reports research aimed at exploring the use of Grammarly software for evaluating non-EFL students’ writings. This research employed descriptive-qualitative method with students of ITB AAS Indonesia as the data sources. The results of analysis show that in correcting students' language errors, lecturers can evaluate and analyze in details without a lot of correcting efforts or improvements. Grammarly can be considered as a useful tool for lecturers who need to correct non-EFL students’ writings. Grammarly will automatically check or detect the work being typed from various related aspects. Various writing errors made by the students were found in Grammarly’s reports, both in the aspect of correctness and clarity. Correctness is concerned with the mechanical norms in writing, whereas clarity deals with concise and direct language use. The spelling errors found in students’ writings are text inconsistencies, misspelled words, and improper formatting whereas for grammatical there are subject-verb disagreement, passive voice misuse, as well as unclear, wordy, and incomplete sentences. Meanwhile, the errors in punctuation are shown by inappropriate use of punctuation marks in compound/complex sentence, comma misuse within clauses, and improper formatting. It can be concluded that Grammarly can be an alternative for lecturers’ in evaluating non-EFL students' writings.

حتقيق النصوص لكتاب االعتكاف يف خمطوطة شرح منهاج الطالبن

<p>This paper is entitled: "Manuscript of I'tikaf on the Book of Syarah Minhaj Ath-Thalibin." Is a scientific work that discuss Manuscript of I'tikaf on the Book of Syarah Minhaj Ath-Thalibin ( philological analysis) with two problem analyzes : How condition of the text The Manuscript I'tikaf in the Book of Syarah Minhaj Ath- Thalibin? How critique of the text The Manuscript I'tikaf in the Book of Syarah Minhaj Ath- Thalibin? To finishing problems, researchers use scientific methods that include collection methods in the form of text criticism analysis theory and literature methods. On the stage of data collection using the library method then at the stage of data presentation using the narrative descriptive method and the critical method of the text. The text of the I'tikaf Manuscript in the Kitab Syarah Minhaj Ath-Thalibin belongs to Ashaf Zein He work as a teacher in one of the schools in Mandar inherited from his father Kiai Ahmad Bin Muh. Zein on located in Bonde village, Campalagian District, Polewali Mandar Regency. In general, the text of the manuscript is still good, but does not have some writing errors and the loss of some letters, words and sentences.</p>

Challenges of the Albanian Language in the Internet Era

Language is a live organism and as every other living being develops and is enriched with new words and terms, which enter the life of society together with the new tool, i.e. they enter in and mix with the order of Albanian words. Such a thing is inevitable and in some cases even useful, but every word that is lined up in the order of Albanian words must be well filtered. “The introduction of new words and exclusion of old ones is a natural process, and it happens in any language. This is what happened with the Greek borrowings in Latin, with the Arabic borrowings in Greek, with the Latin borrowings in many European languages, with the Persian borrowings in Turkish, with the Turkish borrowings in Albanian, etc.” - Prof. Hajri Shehu emphasizes in a scientific interview (Shehu, 2017). In recent decades, with the expansion of the Internet, many foreign words began to enter and be used in the Albanian language. English took up more space than expected; in addition to penetrating through various tool notions, it also replaced centuries-old native words of Albanian. The paper has been divided into three parts and in each part an issue has been dealt with: the first part talks about the use of foreign words and the existing words in Albanian; the second part deals with the use of emoticons used instead of words and the third part deals with writing errors in the Albanian language. These are some of the issues that have created a great concern for the Albanian language in this century and they certainly need to be addressed seriously to prevent the dangers that may threaten it.

Investigating Teachers' Views on writing Errors Made by Saudi University Students

This study aimed to investigate the most frequent errors made by Saudi university students in writing. The study adopted the descriptive-analytic research method. The data of the study was collected from a questionnaire distributed to a sample of 100 English language teachers at Jazan University, King Saud University, and King Khalid University. The above-mentioned tool satisfied the criteria of validity and reliability. The findings revealed the low abilities of the students in understanding and using syntactical rules properly which was reflected in the enormous number of grammatical errors made by the respondents in the test. Wrong tense errors, prepositions, articles errors were found to be the most frequent ones. The findings also revealed that negative transfer from the mother tongue language is one of the major causes of most of the syntactical errors made by the students in the written text. In light of the study findings, several recommendations were suggested by the researcher that could lead to reducing errors made by students in writing and improve students’ writing abilities.