3. Method
3.1 Subjects of the Study
The selected subjects were 40 second year English major students, registered for a writing course called Writing
Strategies in English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Thepsatri Rajabhat University, Thailand.
All of the students had already taken and passed two grammar courses, English Structure in Use, and English
Structure in Context.
3.2 Error Analysis (EA) for L1 Interference Identification
To study L1 interference in the second language acquisition, either Contrastive Analysis (CA) or Error Analysis
(EA) is employed by language researchers. To begin with, the two languages, the mother tongue and the target
language, are compared so as to find out what factors influencing second language acquisition are. Basically, the
comparison can normally be done with the productive skills like speaking and writing. Richards and Schmidt
(2002) explain that Contrastive Analysis (CA) can be used to identify learning problems in a second language,
mainly caused by the interference of the first language. In addition, such difficulties detected can lead to the
effective production of teaching materials, used to decrease the L1 interference in L2 writing performance.
Even though Contrastive Analysis can be used to analyze L1 interference in L2 language production, it is rather
time-consuming as students are asked to write assigned tasks in two languages. Consequently, the theory of Error
Analysis (EA), also called Interlanguage Analysis, has been developed. Maicusi et al. (2000) state, “The error
analysis is supplanted Contrastive Analysis and became a recognized part of Applied Linguistics” (p. 170).
James (2001) describes EA as the alternative approach used to investigate the errors in the target language, which
are ignored by L2 students. In addition, this ignorance is occasionally from the misuse of the linguistic properties
that the users do not know how to deal with it. Jie (2008) endorses Error Analysis, which has been prominently
selected to analyze the errors caused by the influence of the mother tongue. Clearly seen, EA does not only assist
researchers to identify L1 interference in the target language but also helps L2 learners understand why they
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 6, No. 1; 2013
73
make such errors and start learning to correct them. For this reason, Error Analysis is employed in the study in
order to detect L1 interference in Thai students’ writing so as to come up with error categories of the three
aforementioned genres.
3.3 Procedure of Data Collection
The participants were assigned to write three paragraphs in three genres, namely narration, description, and
comparison/contrast, of at least 150 words each. The selection of genres was based on the course syllabus of
Writing Strategies in English. Typically, these genres are required for Thai student writers studying paragraph
writing. The three topics were (1) My Memorable Trip, (2) My Ideal House, and (3) Watching News on
Television VS Reading News from a Paper. One hour each day was allotted for each paragraph, and an
English-English dictionary was allowed. Writing errors caused by L1 interference from the 120 paragraphs were
analyzed using Error Analysis (EA). To clearly portrait, the data collection procedure was presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Procedure of Data Collection
3.4 Data Analysis
The collected paragraphs were analyzed line by line in order to detect errors for L1 interference categorization,
using Error Analysis (EA), and all the L1 interference categories obtained from the analysis were then verified
by three language experts, having been teaching writing courses to Thai university students for at least 10 years,
so as to come up with appropriate error types, which were seen as genuine writing problems of Thai EFL
students. The descriptive statistics used in this study were frequency, mean scores, and percentage.