Universidade Federal de Santa Maria
REGET, Santa Maria, v. 24, e 25, 2020
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5902/2236117040315
Received:
01/10/2019 Accepted: 17/10/2019 Published 15/04/2020
Enviromental Education
Common Grammatical Errors in Written Discourse of EFL Iraqi Learners
Doaa Faris Al-shammeryI
Azar HuesianiII
Hesamoddin ShahriariIII
I Department of
English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Ferdowsi
University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran- d.al.shammery@gmail.com
II Department of
English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Ferdowsi
University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran - Azar. huesiani@um.ac.ir
IIIDepartment of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters and Humanities,
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran - h.shahriari@um.ac.ir
Abstract
The current
study was an attempt to explore the common grammatical errors in written
discourse of EFL Iraqi learners across gender. To this end, five male and five female Iraqi EFL academic learners with the same
proficiency level were randomly selected. The participants were supposed to
write a descriptive composition on a common topic. Findings showed Iraqi EFL
learners made various errors in the following categories including tenses,
prepositions, articles, active and passive voice, verbs and morphological
error. It has been found that most of these errors caused by the effect of
grammatical and linguistic system of participants’ first language on their written production of the
target language.
Keywords: Grammatical errors; Written discourse; EFL
Iraqi Learners
1 Introduction
According to Crompton (2011), learning the complexity of grammar through
writing has continuously remained a problem to many students especially the
second and foreign users of English. In majority of the countries all over the
world, the English variations of British and American are regarded as models,
and the choice of usage greatly depended on whether the country was colonized
by either the Americans or the British people. Commonly, even minor errors in
grammar cripple the meaning of the communication being engaged into. When
errors persist, misunderstanding comes in, causing delays in comprehension,
that further results to failure in the part of the sender as he sends
the intended message to the receiver. As a result, the teachers’
effectiveness and efficiency are being doubted. Though intelligibility and
comprehensibility of what is written are to be primarily observed over
grammatically accurate phrases and sentences, the need of mastering the
complexity of grammar must be addressed especially that English has been
globally used in almost all transactions. Consequently, the ability to use
English correctly and acceptably has now become an edge over others.
Many Arab researchers in context of foreign language teaching had
focused on the learners’ errors in different context (e.g. Rababah,
2005; Al-Bayati, 2013; Humeid
& Altai, 2013). These studies deal with difficulties that Arab learners
encounter in their English learning process. For example, Rababha
(2005) argued thatArab learners of English encounter
problems in both speaking and writing (p. 22). Rababah
(2005) had analyzed these difficulties by indicating the kind of errors
associated with both language use and language usage. In this regard, Corder (1973) argued that the study of errors is part of
the investigation of the process of language learning since these errors
provide us with clear picture of the linguistic development that learner
undergo and give us indicator on what are the learning strategies employed
within this learning process.
1.1 Statement of the Problem
Grammar of a language is one of the key factors to successful writing.
Despite communication skills (CS) being taught in the country for many years,
many people particularly where graduates go to work after graduations, complain
that many graduates cannot communicate effectively in written or spoken
English. It seems, the goals for teaching SC have not
been attained since then. Mwakapina (2011) argues
that most of the students before graduation and after graduation still manifest
low communicative abilities in English as a Second Language (L2). Similarly,
Jordan(1997), Johns (1997), Carson (1997), Prior (1998) and Hintel,
(2002a) argue that despite students having studied English as well as academic
writing in English in their native and in English speaking countries, non-native
speaking students experience a great deal of difficulty in their studies at
college and university levels in English speaking countries. Therefore, the
problem is inherent to both non- native students who study in their native
countries, and even those who go to study abroad.
Many studies have established strong positive linkages between students’ academic
performance and grammar and writing proficiencies (Johns, 1997; Jordan, 1997;
Lee & Schallert, 1997; Byrd & Reid, 1998;
Zhou, 2009). Given the overwhelming assumption that
undergraduate students in the country, even after having undergone training in
CS, many cannot communicate effectively neither in spoken nor in written
English. This study intended to address the matter scientifically by examining
the common grammatical errors made by Iraqi learners in their written
discourse.
1.2 Significance of the Study
The significance of this study stemmed from fact that by revealing the
grammatical errors that Iraqi learners commit during writing production, the
researcher would gain a significant insight on what are the strategies those
Iraqi learners employ in their writing to acquire English language. Moreover,
these errors made from the context of this study might work as a diagnostic
tool in order to uncover the main grammatical problems that Iraqi learners face
in their writing production so that these errors could be the focus of teaching
English language for Iraqi learners in general. Moreover, from pedagogical contribution,
this study would provide teachers of English as a foreign language in Iraq with
the information concerning Iraqis’ difficulties at different stages in their second language acquisition
process so that appropriate courses could be designed and new teaching
materials could be constructed for future teaching. Thus, the current study
proposed the following questions:
RQ1. What are the common
grammatical errors committed by Iraqi learners in written discourse?
RQ2. Is there any significant difference between male
and female EFL Iraqi learners in terms of the grammatical errors made in
written discourse?
2 Review of Literature
In recent years there have been a growing interest
in error analysis as an important branch in the rapid expanding field of
applied linguistic (Tushyeh, 2010). According to Dulay et al. (1982), error analysis is a technique that
concerns with almost all errors made by second language learners including
those resulting from the first language learning (i.e. interlingual
factors) and those which are not traced to the learners native language (i.e. intralagual factors). Corder
(1981) argued that these errors are important in three ways for teacher first
as they shed light on how learners learn the second language and the strategies
they employed in order to learn. Second, these errors are important for
teachers as indicator of learning. And finally they are important for learners
themselves, as these errors are indications of hypothesis testing by the
learners about second language.
As a result, many researchers had examined these errors in different
educational context (e.g. Abushihab, El-Omari & Tobat, 2011; Tahaineh, 2010; Rababah, 2003; Al-Bayati, 2013; Humeid & Altai, 2013; Yahya,
2007; Ariff & Mugableh,
2013). For example, Abushihab et al. (2011) analyzed
the corpus of written discourse of 62 Jordanian EFL students in the department
of English literature and translation at Alzaytooneh
Private University of Jordan. This study was conducted in order to investigate
and classify the grammatical errors that those students commit in their writing
production. Results demonstrated students’ most recurring errors were morphological errors,
articles, verbs, active and passive and tenses. Moreover, results indicated
that the highest category of errors was the errors of prepositions that
comprised 26% of the total errors.
In this line of research, Al-Bayati (2013) had
examined the grammatical errors that Iraqi students of Department of English
language/ college of Arts at University of Kufa.
However, it is worth mentioning here that this study was limited to the errors
in the use of prepositions only and other grammatical errors were left
investigated. Al-Bayati (2013) analyzed a total
number of 32 students’ final examination copybooks in literacy course (i.e. Novel and Drama)
based on Quirk’s (1985)
comprehensive grammar model. Results indicated that three errors were emerged
in the context of this study namely preposition omission, substitution, and
addition. That is, students tend to use proper preposition if equivalent was
find in their mother tongue, select the improper prepositions if equivalents
are not used in in their mother tongue, and omit prepositions if equivalents
are not required in their mother tongue.
Furthermore, Al-Buainain (2010) addressed the
problem that students face constantly in department of English at Qatar
University in their writing course. This study examined 40 exams scripts
collected from those students during their first writing course in university.
This study was based on error analysis techniques are proposed by Corder (1974). Data analysis showed that students’ errors are
systematic and classifiable to include errors in verbs, relative clauses,
articles, fragments, noun modifiers, countable and uncountable nouns, and
prepositions.
Hintel (2002) targeted at techniques for teaching L2 writing, grammar and
lexis that can inform L2 instruction, and effectively targeted L2 areas that
require substantial improvement. On the other hand, Hintel
(2013) focused on specific grammar constructions and their lexical elements
that are critical in teaching L2 academic writing. In the same way, Lynch and
Anderson (2013) provides the key areas of English grammar that one needs to
master, in order to express oneself correctly and
appropriately in academic writing. On the contrary, Johns (1997), Jordan
(1997), Lee and Schallert (1997), Byrd and Reid
(1998) and Zhou ( 2009) stressed on correlating
between academic performance on writing and students grammar.
3 Methodology
3.1 Participants
The participants of this study include 10 male and female Iraqi ELF
learners based on random sampling. They ranged from 25 to 33 years old. They
were all native speakers of Iraqi language with the same language proficiency.
3.2 Instruments & Data Collection Procedure
There were three research instruments in this study, a descriptive
essay, a T-unit analysis, and a study analysis framework adapted from Dulay, Burt and Krashan (1982),
Na-ngam’s
(2005) error taxonomy and Richard’s (1971) error categories:
Dulay, Burt and Krashan’s
(1982) taxonomy was used in particular since it is expected to identify the
language acquisition process that Iraqi students employ in their writing
construction. Thereafter, the researcher started examining the source of errors
generated within these writing essays. These sources are argued to be either
from interlingual or intralingual
source.
The descriptive essay on the topic was chosen as a data collection
instrument because it related to the participants’ interest and background, so it could motivate and
enable them to write comfortably.
The T-unit was used as a data analysis instrument to analyze sentences
in students’ written
essays; its usage was to determine the sentences whether they consisted of a
single unit of the sentence or more, and to identify those units whether they
were a dependent clause or an independent clause.
Na-ngam’s
(2005) error taxonomy was employed to identify grammatical errors into types.
It consisted of 23 types of grammatical errors: incomplete sentences (fragments
and omissions), run-on sentences, comparison, word order, there-be, tenses,
voices, agreements, infinitives and gerunds, nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives,
pronouns, modals and auxiliaries, possessive’s, conjunctions, prepositions, articles,
punctuations, capitalization and spelling.
Richards’ (1971) error categories were manipulated to identify L1 interference
errors. It originally consisted of ten types: omission of subject/verb/object/
complement, incorrect verb construction (serial verb construction), plural form
of nouns, compound/ complex sentence structure, word order, “there” structure,
fragment, run-on sentence, and word-by-word translation. Since this study aimed
at investigating grammatical errors and L1 interference errors, the above
frameworks were then combined. However, there were six types of L1 interference
errors in Richards’ errors categories that overlapped with some of error types in Na-ngam’s
error taxonomy. According to T-unit analysis, moreover, there were two types of
errors in the merged framework that could not be considered as grammatical
errors, and they needed to be eliminated from the framework; they were
capitalization errors and spelling errors. Therefore, the study analysis
framework, then, consisted of 26 types of errors ; they were incomplete
sentences (fragments and omissions), run-on sentences, comparison, word order,
there-be, tenses, voices, agreements, infinitives, gerunds, nouns, verbs,
adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, modals, auxiliaries, possessive’s,
conjunctions, prepositions, articles, punctuations, incorrect verb construction
(serial verb construction), compound/ complex sentence, word by word
translation and others (errors that was too complicated to be grouped).
In summary, among the 26 types of grammatical errors, there were 10
types of them were also considered as L1 interference errors. However, after
this framework was tried out, four more types of L1 interference errors were
added to the researcher’s framework as they could be found in Iraqi students’ written
work. These four extra types of L1 interference errors were sub-types under
some of the 26 types of grammatical errors. For more understandable, the four
extra types of L1 interference errors were: 1) misuse of simple present tense
for simple past tense (a sub-type of tenses), 2) subject-verb agreement (a
sub-type of agreement), 3) omission of auxiliary in negative sentences (a
sub-type of verbs), and 4) omission of some punctuation marks (comma/ period/
question mark) (a sub-type of punctuations). Therefore, the adapted framework
was then carrying 14 types of L1 interference errors. The interlingual
sources are those caused by negative transfer or interference from the learners’ mother
tongue, while the intralingual sources are those
caused by interference within the target language itself (Dulay
et al. 1982).
3.3 Data Collection
In order to analyze the data, the adapted framework for the current
study was designed as follows:
Table 1 - The adapted
framework for the current study
|
Tense |
Preposition |
Articles |
Active
& Passive Voice |
Verbs |
Morphological errors |
|
Past perfect instead of simple past |
Omission |
Omission of
“the” |
Passive
auxiliary Be omission |
Omission of
verb “be” |
Omission of
plural ending “s” |
|
Present progressive instead of simple
present |
Addition |
Addition of
“the” |
Passive
with intransitive verb Be addition |
Addition of
verb “be” |
Misuse of
plural errors and addition of the plural ending “s” |
|
Simple past instead of simple present |
Misuse |
Omission of
“a/an” |
Preposition
confusion |
Misuse of
the verb “be” |
Misuse of
possessive “s” |
|
Simple present instead of present perfect |
|
Addition of
“a/an” |
|
Omission of
the verbs |
Incorrect
use of comparative adjectives |
|
Simple past instead of present perfect |
|
Misuse of
articles |
|
Misuse of
other verbs |
Wrong word
form |
4 Results
4.1 Data Analysis
Overall, 352 grammatical errors were found in both groups of male and
female learners. To find out the answer to the first research question the
errors were analyzed based the adapted framework. Table 2 presents the results.
Table 2 - Frequency
and percentage of the committed errors
|
|
Tense |
Preposition |
Articles |
Active& Passive Voice |
Verbs |
Morphological
errors |
|
|
Frequency |
53 |
48 |
59 |
56 |
65 |
71 |
352 |
|
Percentage |
12% |
11% |
14% |
13% |
22% |
28% |
100 |
According to Table 2, the most commonly errors committed by EFL Iraqi
learners include morphological errors (71, 28%), verbs (65, 22%), articles (59,
14%), active and passive (56, 13%), tense (53, 12%), and preposition (48, 11%),
respectively. In addition, the committed errors by the male and female were
calculated separately and compared via independent samples t-test. Table 3
illustrates the results.
Table 3 - One Sample
T-Test for Iraqi male and female groups
|
Levene's Test for Equality of Variances |
t-test for Equality of
Means |
||||||||
|
F |
Sig. |
t |
df |
Sig.(-tailed) |
Mean Difference |
Std. Error Difference |
95% Confidence Interval
of the Difference |
||
|
Lower |
Upper |
||||||||
|
Equal variances assumed |
2.583 |
.111 |
1.436 |
9 |
.154 |
1.233 |
.859 |
-.467 |
2.934 |
|
Equal variances not assumed |
|
|
1.436 |
111.833 |
.154 |
1.233 |
.859 |
-.468 |
2.935 |
As shown in Table 3, due to the fact that Levene's Test result is not significant(p> 0.05)the equal
variances assumed was considered. In t-test for equality of means, since p<
0.154 is more
than the significance level α = 0.05, and therefore, it is
concluded that the mean two groups is not
significantly different.
5 Discussion
The current study was set to investigate the common grammatical errors
among Iraqi male and female EFL learners in the written discourse. The findings
revealed that the common grammatical errors consisted of morphological errors,
verbs, articles, active and passive, tense, and preposition, respectively. In
addition, the current study explored the difference between the male and female
Iraqi EFL learners in terms of the grammatical errors in written discourse. The
findings indicated that no difference was found in male and female groups. The findngs can be attributed to the fact that interference
from L1 and inadequate components of L2 are the main source of errors. These
results are argued to be very essential in learning the target language since
the sources of errors within the context of this study were identified so that
remedial teaching design can be easily prepared depend on these results
generated.
Studying the nature of errors enables teachers of foreign languages and
researchers to have a better understanding of the linguistic area where
learners have the most difficulty while writing. The data provided by the
analysis of learners' errors might help teachers, syllabus designers and test
developers to determine their way of teaching or materials in the process of
language teaching and learning. They should make use of such studies to acquire
new techniques and insights. It is possible for them to see language learners
from a different point of view.
The results of the study indicated that the Iraqi students
learners are competent in basic rules of the target language, but their
knowledge of the target language has some defects. These defects in Learning the target language may be due to the lack of
practice in writing during their education level at schools in Iraqi or during
their degree level. Accordingly, teachers of foreign languages should focus on
the most common errors and try to overcome them by using various materials and
methods. They can conduct remedial teaching using exercises and skills related
to the problematic areas of the target language. Besides, textbook designers
and syllabus designers should design their materials in the light of these
errors. Test developers should also construct their tests according to these
errors so that they could measure students’ improvement by proper tests.
6 Conclusion
Regarding the types of errors found in the grammatical categories, intralanguage interference (interference within the target
language) was found to be the most dominant cause of errors in students’ written
work. This means that Iraqi learners lack concrete grammatical knowledge of the
target language. Further studies may consider comparing EFL learners regarding
the errors they make in their writing. Knowing the similarities and the differences
between two groups through error analysis would tell us a lot about students’ learning
process. Three possible pedagogical implications could be drawn from this
study. First, committing errors is a part of language learning process. Thus,
students’ errors can
be considered as valuable resources to improve teaching and learning in writing
classrooms. Students’ attempt in trying to write ought to be praised and teachers must
motivate their students to write in order to apply the correct grammatical form
in their writing. Second, for specific instructional activities for verb tense,
explicit instruction in each linguistic feature should be included in the
classroom. Teachers can provide collaborative teaching technique for practicing
different tenses in different contexts. Third, most of the grammatical errors
found were from the lack of knowledge of the target language, which may
indicate that students have not received sufficient input in their writing
instructions. Therefore, English language teachers ought
to be trained in using various innovative teaching methods and techniques in
the class to help students fully understand the English language system.
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