HM: Research Reports
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing HM: Research Reports by Subject "English Writing"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- PublicationA Comparative Study of English Essay Writing Strategies and Difficulties as Perceived by English Major Students: A Case Study of School of Humanities, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce(University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, 2007)
; The purposes of this study were to investigate English essay writing strategies used and English essay writing difficulties encountered by English major students at School of Humanities, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, to compare English essay writing strategies used and difficulties in writing English essays encountered by high and low English proficiency students, and to compare difficulties in writing English essays encountered by students with different background.The data were gathered from 272 fourth year English major students of academic year 2005. The subjects passed two writing courses emphasizing on paragraph and essay writing. A questionnaire was used to collect data. Percentage, Means, Standard Deviation and t-test were used for data analysis.The major findings are as follows: firstly, the students practiced most in gathering information for the prewriting stage by using the Internet and preparing to write essays by setting the main idea. Regarding strategies for writing essays, the student wrote introduction by using facts and statistics, wrote the topic sentence as the first sentence in a paragraph, wrote conclusions by summarizing main points, and used transitional words to make ideas coherent. They consulted Thai-English dictionaries, revised and edited essays by checking spelling.Secondly, the students had difficulties the most in getting readers’ attention and using verb tenses.Thirdly, when comparing strategies used in writing English essays between high and low proficiency groups, significant differences at 0.05 were found in all steps in the writing process namely gathering information for essays, planning, writing introduction, body and conclusion of essays, revising and editing.Fourthly, when comparing difficulties encountered by high and low proficiency groups in organizing essays, there were significant differences at 0.05 in both organizing essays and writing essays in English language.Lastly, when comparing difficulties encountered by students with different background, there was a significant difference at 0.05 between male and female students in having no time to revise and edit essays. When comparing students practicing and not practicing English outside classroom, it was found that there were significant differences at 0.05 in both organizing essays and writing essays in English language. Regarding comparison of difficulties encountered by students practicing writing skill and students practicing other skills outside classroom, there were significant differences at 0.05 in both organizing essays and writing essays in English language.27 318 - PublicationA Comparative Study of Postmodifiers Used in Business News in Leading Newspapers in Thailand, USA, and UK(University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, 2011)
; The purposes of this study were to investigate types of sentences frequently used in business news, to investigate types and functions of postmodifires frequently used in each type of sentence in business news in the Bangkok Post, The Nation, USA Today, and The Guardian, and to synthesize patterns of postmodifiers used in each type of sentence. The corpus was 120 business news stories from four newspapers covering economics, marketing, commerce, industry, information technology, and property selected during April and June 2010. Frequency and percentage were employed for the data analysis.The study revealed that complex sentences were used most frequently in the Bangkok Post, USA Today, and The Guardian while simple sentences were used most frequently in The Nation. Prepositional phrases modifying noun phrases were used most frequently in simple, complex and compound-complex sentences in all the four newspapers studied. Regarding compound sentences, prepositional phrases modifying noun phrases were used most frequently in the Bangkok Post, The Nation, and USA Today while compound sentences in The Guardian included prepositional phrases modifying verb phrases at the highest percentage. News writers tended to place both phrase and clause postmodifiers, which occurred in series and included other types of embedded postmodifiers, in predicate part more than in the subject part. Prepositional phrases, present participial phrases, past participial phrases, and appositive phrases were frequently used in both parts but adverb phrases, and elliptical clauses were always placed at the end of the sentence. Simple and complex sentences included more varieties of postmodifier types than in compound and compound-complex sentences. The Bangkok Post and foreign news writers tended to use postmodifiers in similar ways.58 537 - PublicationA Study on EFL Teachers’ Awareness and Tolerance of Thai Undergraduate Students’ Syntactic Writing Errors(University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, 2013)
; This survey study investigated non-native EFL teachers’ awareness and tolerance of Thai undergraduates’ syntactic writing errors. The instrument for collecting data in the study was a twenty-page English-version questionnaire based on the written errors by the nineteen types of Thai students’ directly experienced by the researcher and revealed by other research. Excluding miscellaneous errors, the results show that 16 errors were moderately found (41-60%) and 2 errors were close to most frequently found (61-80%). They were article: and verb tense. Top-five frequently found errors included article, verb tense, run-on sentence, fragment, and subject-verb agreement respectively. Five errors with percentages of L1 interference close to 50% or higher were word order, fragment, run-on sentence, over-marking of conjunction, and singular or plural form. Among all given intralingual causes, incomplete application of rules and ignorance of rule restrictions received higher percentages than others. Regarding teachers’ tolerance of 18 errors, all except one error (preposition) were to be corrected immediately, or as soon as possible. There were no correlation between error frequency and error tolerance except from article (insertion) and subject-object pronoun. There were also no correlation between error type (global or local) and error tolerance except from verb tense (sequence) and modal verb.20 187