Analyses of Structural Organization and Subject-Verb Agreement of English Paragraphs Written by Thai Accounting Students

Abstract

This study aimed to study the structural organization of paragraphs and the errors in subject-verb agreement committed by 3^rd year accounting students at a university in Thailand. The corpus was 20 English paragraphs collected from examination papers. The macro-analysis of the structural organization of paragraphs lined focused on the three elements containing in a paragraph: topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence, while the micro-analysis was identified the errors in subject-verb agreement at the sentence level. It was found that 30% of the corpus omitted a concluding sentence. The supporting points were weak and awkward, and there were no clear evidence or examples to back up the topic sentence. Errors in subject-verb agreement in the pattern “Basic subject-verb agreement” were found frequently, accounting for 72 percent. Sentence construction and errors in mechanics were also problems in the paragraphs. The findings of this study provide practical implications for the development of writing courses and teaching materials for EFL students. Based on the findings, not only the structural organization of paragraphs and sentence formation in relation to subject-verb agreement, but grammatical errors and mechanics are also important for writing paragraphs and should be emphasized in writing classes.