Error Analysis of Business College Students’ Academic Essays: A Case Study

Bhutanese ESL students struggle in English despite studying it as a major subject from pre-primary through their schools and colleges.However, little is known about the errors that business college students make in their written academic essays.Thus, Corder's (1974) procedural error analysis was adopted to examine errors in 217 academic essays written by the freshmen of a business college.Careful identification of the errors revealed four commonly recurring errors in the essays.These errors were collected, identified, described and explained with relevant findings obtained from the previous studies.The findings of this study are expected to inform the English language teachers of the types of errors that college students make and the sources of these errors.Based on the findings, the researchers recommend English language teachers to design exercises that can address these errors.However, as the study was restricted to a business college, it may not be possible to generalize the findings to other in-country colleges under the Royal University of Bhutan.