著者

北村 まゆみ

出版者

全国英語教育学会

雑誌

全国英語教育学会紀要 (ISSN:13448560)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.22, pp.169-184, 2011

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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether errors affect the quality of essay writing by Japanese EFL university students. Using a decision tree analysis, a total of 134 essays on two topics from a corpus written by Japanese university students were selected and analyzed. The results showed that the ratio of errors per word was not an influential predictor affecting writing quality in essays on the topic "school education," whereas it was a predictor of essay scores in the case of the other topic, "money." Our qualitative analysis also revealed that students at the Middle level produced sentence fragments and even learners at the High level made frequent errors in subject-verb agreements. These results suggest that errors have some influence on essay evaluation.