| Volume 3 Index July 2009 |

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Title
How I Learned to Speak English?: Factors Involved in ESL Acquisition among Filipinos

 Author
Carlo Magno
De La Salle University, Manila

Bio Data:
Carlo Magno is presently an Assistant Professor at the Counseling and Educational Psychology Department at De La Salle University-Manila. He finished his PhD in Educational Psychology major in Measurement and Evaluation. His current research interests are psycholinguistics, self-regulation, learner-centeredness, and teacher performance. He has published in local and international refereed journals and has presented his studies at different international conferences.

Abstract
This study is part of the larger project which aims at identifying the
linguistic features found in the diagnostic essays of freshmen college students from five private schools in Metro Manila, Philippines, in their first week of classes. The intention is to find out what structures students have acquired in their developing linguistic
competence prior to their English Communication One instruction in college in order to identify their needs. This report focuses on the analysis of sentence-level errors and suggests ways for pedagogical enhancement. Findings show that the most frequently occuring errors are related to punctuation usage (comma), vocabulary (word form and word choice), verb usage, prepositions, run-on and fragments, noun endings (plural/singular and articles), and even as basic as capitalization usage. All errors equally occur in all proficiency levels except word choice, capitalization, and missing or unnecessary comma, which have the lowest occurrence in level three proficiency. The findings will prove beneficial for curricular enhancement.