Investigating English-majored Senior Students’ Application of Grammar in Report Writing

Abstract

Abstract Grammar helps communication either in the written or spoken forms go smoothly and look and sound academically. Due to this important role of grammar, this study explored English-majored senior students’ utilization of grammar in their report writing, one of the requirements in the program. A mixed method was employed by utilizing summative content analysis to collect the data on types of grammatical errors, unclear-meaning texts, and language interference from 49 reports written by 49 students. In addition, nine Vietnamese-speaking teachers of English were invited to remark on a two-scale survey “Agree” or “Disagree” with the extracts postulated by the authors, who considered such extracts have evidence in language interference and meaning clarity. The results show that students encountered 13 common grammatical errors: sentence fragments, sentence connectors, passive voice, collocations, parts of speech, prepositions, parallel structures, nouns, adjective clauses, and articles; the three most prevalent grammatical errors are simple past tense, run-on sentences, and word choice. Most teachers highly agreed with the suggested extracts by the authors regarding the unclear meaning and language-interference extracts. The study has contributed to the English bachelor program, where English grammar lessons are taught and tested implicitly, to reconsider teaching them explicitly and integrate them into writing effectively. The results, furthermore, suggested that factors related to grammar learning and mastering, such as teaching and learning methods, students’ motivation, and curriculum need further investigation. Detailed discussion and limitations of the results were presented.