A closer look at writing errors in senior project theses: Insights from Thai computer engineering undergraduates

Abstract

Academic writing, both in Thai and English, is a difficult problem that many Thai university students must deal with. Due to a lack of understanding of English grammar structures and Thai spelling, many errors were found in the senior project theses. This paper studied errors in senior project theses written by Thai computer engineering undergraduate students to obtain valuable information about the errors frequently appeared in their writings. The theses were entirely written in Thai, except for the English abstracts. Different types of errors, both in Thai and English, as well as their corresponding frequencies, were investigated. To investigate the errors, the types of errors were typed as words or texts representing the error types. AntConc was then used to find the word frequencies that corresponded to the error types. The ten most frequent errors found in the English abstracts were: 1) articles, 2) capital letters, 3) sentence structures, 4) singular and plural, 5) commas, 6) verb forms, 7) full stop, 8) prepositions, 9) adjectives, and 10) misspelling. As for the parts that were not English abstracts, the results revealed that English-Thai transliterated words such as ไลบรารี (lai-braa-ree, “library”), อัปโหลด (àp-lòht, “upload”), ฟังก์ชัน (fang-chan, “function”), and ดิจิทัล (dì-jì-tan, “digital”) were often misspelled by the students. It was evident that Thai words were written incorrectly due to the following respects: 1) Thai final consonants (31.66%), 2) Thai tone markers (23.23%), 3) Thai initial consonants (19.57%), 4) Thai vowels (18.34%), and 5) Thai unpronounced consonants (7.20%). The present findings could have pedagogical implications for understanding the types of errors made by the engineering students. These results could be used to create a guidebook or manual to help the students master and achieve publishable quality in their senior project theses.