An Investigation of the Effect of Self-correction on Error and Syntactic Complexity of Korean Adults English Writing

The present study was designed and conducted for the purpose of investigating the effect of self-correction on Korean adults’ writing in terms of error and syntactic complexity. Data analyses showed that there was statistically significant difference between the total numbers of the errors from the pretest and the posttest. Furthermore, all the error types present in Korean adults’ essays witnessed a reduction after fourteen weeks of self-correction. In addition, it should be worth the effort to note that the most frequent error type, Awkward expression accounted for more than half of a total number of errors. Unlike the positive role of self-correction on writing, there was no significant effect of self-correction on syntactic complexity. As a result, error analysis needs to be practiced in the classroom for comprehending error types which students make and designing teaching materials for strategies of having their pupils reduce errors in writing. Furthermore, it is highly recommended that learning and teaching of sentence-level writing along with grammar be reinforced in the classroom since without these students are prone to failing to improve the quality of their English writing.