Abstract:
In teaching English writing, one important thing is to check to the correctness of sentences in students’ writing. The purposes of this study were: 1) to investigate syntactic errors in English paragraphs written by English major students at BuriramRajabhat University, and 2) to investigated the causes of the syntactic errors in English paragraphs. The samples of this study were 40 second year English major students who enrolled in Paragraphs Writing course (1552402) in the first semester of the academic year 2016 at BuriramRajabhat University. They were selected by using a purposive sampling technique. Forty English paragraphs written by the students were collected and analyzed using error analysis scheme. The statistics used in data analysis were frequency and percentage. The results of the study showed that the most frequent types of syntactic errors were incomplete sentences. The second frequent types of syntactic errors were run on sentences, and the third frequent types of errors were wrong word order. The results indicated that the main causes of errors committed in this study were due to incomplete application of rules, followed by false concept hypothesized and mother tongue interference. The results of the study could be useful for teachers who teach English writing course. The demonstrations of gathered syntactic errors in the classroom may help students have better understanding in L1 and L2 differences.
