VietTESOL International Convention 2026

For EFL students, writing skills function as an indispensable tool to consolidate grammatical knowledge, broaden lexical resources, and enhance overall language proficiency. This study aims to analyze the frequent types of errors in paragraph writing among first-year EFL students, thereby suggesting pedagogical interventions to mitigate these issues. A mixed-methods approach was employed, utilizing document analysis of 85 paragraph-formatted compositions on a single assigned topic and informal interviews with seven participants. The subjects were first-year EFL students at a B1 proficiency level (CEFR) at a university in Hanoi. With the adoption of Brown’s taxonomy for error categorization, the findings revealed that the most prevalent errors encompassed the absence of clear topic sentences, grammatical inaccuracies, and incorrect sentence structures. Qualitative data from the interviews pointed out that these errors primarily stemmed from L1 interference and insufficient corrective feedback in prior learning contexts. These results highlight the necessity for EFL teachers to refine their marking and feedback-giving strategies. It is hoped that the study will contribute to the development of more effective writing instruction and the improvement of students' academic writing performance.