AN ANALYSIS OF ERRORS IN BUSINESS CASE REPORTS WRITTEN BY VIETNAMESE STUDENTS

Abstract

The writing of business case reports requires conscious effort and much practice, which presents significant challenges for students on academic business programs, especially students writing business case reports in a second language such as Vietnamese students. The present paper aims to explore errors in writing in relation to the rhetorical moves and stylistic features that university students usually face in their business case reports writing. Data for this study, which were 56 business case reports written by students studying Business English at the Da Nang University - University of Foreign Languages in Vietnam, were analyzed to determine the types of errors in student‟s reports. The main rationale behind this paper is to provide with objective criteria for evaluation and clues about what to focus on in teaching. For learners, the findings are helpful since they could be shown what they have to pay more attention to when writing business case reports. The findings showed that the students committed many different types of errors when writing business case reports. In general, the most common error that the majority of students made in their writing is stylistic error (70.2%). More specifically, while lacking of formality is the most popular stylistic error (34.6%), the most common error in terms of rhetorical moves found in student„s reports relates to orientation move (68.2%).