Analysis of Language Errors in Essay Writing of Non-Native Students of Interracial Secondary Schools in Selangor

Abstract

In this 21st century, it is crucial for students to become fluent in a foreign language, whether it be either written or spoken. However, in the context of this research, it was discovered that non-native speakers of the language encounter difficulties when attempting to hone the skill of writing Malay language essays. A qualitative study using the document analysis method was conducted to analyse the aspects of linguistic mistakes that happen most frequently. For the essay writing review method of non-native speakers to be highly content-reliable, the student essay script data must adhere to the syllabus. The essay script has been reviewed to be equivalent to the IELTS Junior® and TOEFL Junior essay evaluation criteria as well as the scoring rubric used by the Malaysian Examinations Council for the Malay Language Examination in national-type schools (SJK). Purposive sampling was used to select 50 essay scripts from non-native speaking students from five interracial secondary schools in Selangor. The research findings indicated that the majority of participants (53.3%) scored at the lowest level for language proficiency, while 26.6% are at a fair level. According to the analysis of the script data, the most significant linguistic mistakes were morphological, including spelling, affixes, and vocabulary selection errors, followed by semantic, grammatical, and syntactic mistakes. Based on the results of the diagnostic test and the frequency of errors in the language aspect, which is quite important, the researchers suggest a specific study related to the process of writing in Malay subject to develop a simple but systematic step-by-step writing module, student-friendly, fun, informative, meaningful, effective, and even the understanding of learning to write will last a long time.