An Error Analysis of Korean University Students’ English Summary Writing

While EFL students’ writing in relation to error analysis has been an area of interest to academics in the EFL field, recently, a number of studies have been conducted regarding summary writing in particular, which can be a common feature in higher education and academic writing. This study identifies the predominant types of errors found in summaries written by Korean EFL university students, and compares and contrasts error patterns identified between high and low proficiency English learners. For this study, 128 summaries of English news articles written by 16 participating university students were analyzed based on error analysis categories adapted from Ferris (2002) with AntConc3.4.4.(http://www.laurenceanthony.net/). The results indicate that syntactic items were the most problematic areas for students in summary writing, followed by issues with morphology and lexis. While students in the high proficiency group had a lower frequency of errors in each category, they made more errors in a number of subcategories including verb tense, verb form, and determiners. The findings of this study indicate that, in relation to summary writing, higher proficiency students are prone to making such errors as a result of increased paraphrasing and complex sentence production, while lower proficiency students tend to produce simpler sentences.