COMMON PUNCTUATION ERRORS OF YEAR 4 PUPILS IN THEIR ENGLISH WRITING EXERCISES

English Language Teaching

This study aimed to investigate the common errors in punctuations that children have in their English writing tasks. The target group was Year 4 pupils in an international school in Bangkok, Thailand. The data were randomly gathered across five different classes in Year 4. The researcher selected twenty different written outputs from the pupils’ English workbooks. The twenty authentic texts were writing exercises that the children have done in their English lessons since the start of the school year. The written outputs include pen pal letters, recounts, diary entries, narrative, descriptive writing, persuasive letters, newspaper reports, and explanation texts. Corpus linguistics was the method used in this research. The twenty authentic texts were carefully read, annotated, and analyzed by the researchers to know the common punctuation mark errors committed by the Year 4 pupils in their English writing tasks. The results were then recorded using a table. Then, the punctuation errors were ranked from the punctuation mark that got the most number of errors to the punctuation mark that got the least number of errors. The findings from this study revealed that the common punctuation errors were comma, period, semicolon, colon, apostrophe and inverted commas. It was found that the comma has the most number of errors meanwhile colon, inverted commas, and apostrophe has the least number of errors.

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