PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

The focus of this study was to highlight different kinds of errors and variations that emerge in the writings ofESL students. The participants of the study were twelve TESL undergraduate students from the Faculty ofEducational Studies at Universiti Putra Malaysia. Students' written descriptions on a picture stimulus werecollected and qualitatively analyzed. Then, the emerging errors in their descriptions were categorized intothe linguistic and surface structure taxonomies. The findings revealed different grammatical errors in theirwritings which were basically related to the categories of verb phrases and noun phrases in either simple orcompound/complex sentences that resulted in giving misinformation, one of the categories in surface structure.Some variations were also found in the word choice of the students in the three ethnic groups of the study,whereby these choices might be the reflections of their cultural background and world view. The results couldhelp material developers to develop the necessary tasks and exercises and teachers to devise the best teachingstrategies for overcoming these kinds of errors in ESL learners' writings.