A Corpus-Based Study on Korean High School Students’ Common Errors in English Writing

The purpose of this study is to investigate the common errors in writing production made byKorean high school students. It aims to provide information on the areas that Korean highschool students need to develop and to inform their educational needs. For this, high schoolstudents’ writing samples were collected and built into a learner corpus named ShinhyeonCorpus of High school Learners’ English Essays (SCOHLEE). The study identified frequenterrors produced by the high school students adopting a computer-aided error analysis (CEA)technique using the Louvain Error Tagging Manual, and quantitative and qualitative analyseswere conducted by using corpus tools (AntConc 4.0). The results revealed that a total of3,368 errors were categorized into 7 major categories and 47 sub-categories, with articleerrors (GA) produced the most. Regarding English proficiency, mid-level learners produceda higher rate of errors and a wider range of error types. Additionally, the study showed asignificant increase in the frequency of punctuation errors in the second semester. Overall,this study has pedagogical implications for lexis, grammar and writing instruction and theprovision of error correction.