Error Analysis of Undergraduate Students’ Research Proposals in English
Abstract
This study investigates the errors present in undergraduate students’ research proposals written in English, with a focus on identifying, classifying, and analyzing the most common linguistic and discourse-level problems. Research proposal writing is a crucial academic skill at the university level; however, many EFL learners face persistent difficulties in producing accurate, coherent, and academically appropriate texts. These difficulties often result in various types of errors that affect the clarity, quality, and acceptability of their proposals. The study adopts a descriptive quantitative research design supported by qualitative textual analysis. A purposive sample of undergraduate research proposals collected from students of English or related disciplines is analyzed using Corder’s (1967) Error Analysis framework and Dulay, Burt, and Krashen’s (1982) Surface Strategy Taxonomy. The errors are categorized into grammatical errors (tense, subject-verb agreement, articles, and prepositions), lexical errors (word choice and collocation), syntactic errors (sentence structure and word order), and discourse-level errors (cohesion and coherence issues). The findings reveal that grammatical errors, particularly in article usage, verb tense, and prepositions, are the most frequent, followed by lexical and syntactic errors. Discourse-level issues such as weak coherence and poor organization are also anticipated to be significant challenges. The study further explores the sources of errors, including interlingual transfer from the mother tongue and intralingual factors such as overgeneralization and incomplete rule application.
Keywords: Error Analysis, Undergraduate Students, Research Proposals, EFL Writing, Grammatical Errors, Academic Writing, Interlingual Errors
