Title
Medical Students Most Frequent Errors at Mahidol University, Thailand

Keywords: error analysis, medical student, sentence level, paragraph level, translation

Authors
Anchalee Sattayatham and Somchoen Honsa, Jr.
Mahidol University, Thailand

Bio Data
Professor Anchalee Sattayatham is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts, Mahidol University. She got her Master’s degrees in English from Central Missouri State University. She has been teaching English to medical and science students for twenty-six years. Her recent interest includes self-access material development and analytical reading.

Professor Somchoen Honsa, Jr. is an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts, Mahidol University. She got her Master’s degrees in English from Humboldt State University, USA. Her interests and experiences include Greek Mythodology, woman writers, folklore in literature, language testing, and alternative assessment such as self-assessment and portfolio assessment.

Abstract
This study focuses on error analysis of first year medical students from the four medical schools at Mahidol University. A total of 44% of enrolled students participated, about 237. They were asked to translate sentences from Thai into English, translate a paragraph from Thai into English, and write an opinion paragraph in English on medical ethics. Data collected from the sentence-level translation, paragraph level translation, and opinion paragraph writing were analyzed to find the most frequent errors of these medical students by using the distribution of frequency. The top-ten errors of each medical school and of all medical schools were identified and the chi-square was used to find dependency among the three types of writing. The findings show that there is dependency between sentence level translation and paragraph level translation, and between paragraph level translation and opinion paragraph writing. The results will be of benefit for material development, especially in the provision of materials in the Language Learning Centre.