An analysis of English as a foreign language undergraduate students' written errors

Abstract

Writing is an intricate process in the first language and its intricacy increases when writing in the targeted language. Although Kurdish students of English study English writing at most levels of their education in Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), it has been observed that they commit serious errors even in the basics of writing. These errors may influence their writing in English and their overall English language proficiency level. Nevertheless, meticulous research in the arena of error analysis is scanty in the KRI context compared to the body of research conducted in this area in the Arab world. This study was undertaken to analyze the errors committed by English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) undergraduate students to recognize the most and the least prevalent errors committed by students and present and explain some possible causes and sources of those errors. The study investigated errors in a collection of 57 argumentative essays. Four categories of errors were taken into consideration, namely, grammatical, lexical, spelling, and punctuation as well as their subcategories. Frequencies and percentages of errors were first recognized, and then the common subcategories of each of the errors were tabulated, explained, and described with examples from the corpus. The reported results showed that the overall frequency and percentage of the errors were high and grammatical errors were the most common. Lexical errors were found to be the least common errors in students' written productions. Additionally, the most prevalent subcategories of the errors were presented and interpreted. The study concluded that the major causes of written errors in the KRI context were both interlingual and intralingual errors.