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Author
Assistant Professor Dr. Panornuang Sudasna Na Ayudhya
            English Department, Bansomdejchaoraya Rajabhat University, Bangkok,
Thailand

Title
      PreLanguage Awareness in EIL: The Analysis of Errors in Academic Text Writing of Thai Learners.

Abstract
The paper presents the data obtained from the analysis of errors found in 60 pieces of academic written works of 60 first year Thai undergraduate students majoring in English. The purposes of this study were to identify and classify errors in writing and to investigate the relationship of writing errors to language awareness levels. All 60 students were assigned papers to write in English and asked to answer the language awareness questionnaire to split them into 2 groups of High and Low language awareness levels using the scores obtained from the questionnaire. The errors found in written papers were analyzed to find error frequencies and percentages and were identified, classified, and discussed in terms of interference errors, intralingual errors, and developmental errors. Results showed that there were significant differences in error frequencies and percentages in 2 groups of students. However, these 2 groups showed similarity on the types of ill-formed sentences and the types of errors. There were three most frequent types of ill-formed sentences: 1) omission of subjects, verbs, objects, and complements, 2) incorrect form of compound and complex sentence structures, and 3) word-order error. All three types of errors: interference, intralingual, and developmental errors were found in both 2 groups. Interference errors were found the most frequently among the three types of errors. This study demonstrated that language awareness can lead to positive effect to writing skill. The paper concludes with implementing language awareness in regular EIL writing development.

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