analysis of grammatical errors in English speaking of Thai EFL Students

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the instances of grammar mistakes in the spoken English of Thai EFL university students. The research objectives were to compare the errors committed in lexical and sentence structure and their frequencies. The participants comprised 43 first-year English for Business Communication students learning General Listening and Speaking courses at the Sakon Nakhon Rajabhat University. The data was gathered through recorded impromptu speeches on randomly assigned topics. The recordings were transcribed and then the data was analyzed using the Surface Strategy Taxonomy. The findings showed that there were 158 grammatical mistakes in total, and they are based on four main categories. Misformation errors were most prevalent, accounting for 69.62% of all errors, with subject-verb agreement (25.32%) and verb form (17.72%) errors being particularly common. Additional errors constituted 15.82%, omission errors 13.29%, and misordering errors 1.27% of the total. The most frequent subcategories were subject-verb agreement errors (25.32%), verb form misformation (17.72%), and tense misformation (12.66%). These results indicate that Thai EFL learners have considerable difficulties in utilizing appropriate grammatical structures in spoken English, and particularly verbs and agreements. The high frequency of misformation errors points to the fact that more focused instruction on problematic structures need to be addressed in lessons in contexts that convey meaningful communication. As such, it provides findings that could help plan specific instructional strategies and curriculum design for enhancing Thai students' spoken English proficiency.