Applying Surface Strategy Taxonomy to Analyze Argumentative Writing Errors: A Case Study of Thai Undergraduates
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60101/jla.2026.7.1.10848Keywords:
error analysis, argumentative writing, surface strategy taxonomyAbstract
This study examines the grammatical errors at a word level and their underlying causes in argumentative essays written by Thai EFL undergraduates. This study employed a quantitative research design. The population was 98 third-year undergraduates enrolled in an argumentative writing course in the second semester of the 2026 academic year at the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the public university in central Thailand. The participants included 33 students selected through purposive sampling. The research instrument was the Surface Strategy Taxonomy (SST) collection form used to record students’ writing errors. The data were analyzed using frequency and percentage. The results revealed that misinformation was the most common error, followed by omission, addition, and misordering, respectively. Moreover, the causes of errors included intralingual errors such as overgeneralization, rule ignorance, and false hypotheses, as well as interlingual errors related to the "double subject" construction, which reflects confusion among Thai learners regarding direct syntactic transfer from Thai to the target language.
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