Cross-gender Analysis of Iraqi EFL Learners Recurrent Grammatical Errors in English

Abstract

The study attempts to investigate recurrent grammatical errors that hinder Iraqi undergraduate EFL learners` mastery of English grammar. If male-female learners of English are not competent in the structural and semantic bases of tense, they can hardly produce acceptable sentences in the L2/FL. For this purpose, an elicitation test is used to sort out the typical errors of Iraqi male-female undergraduate students (1st, 3rd and 4th stage) of the Department of English Language and Literature in Mustansiriyah University / Iraq, with respect to specific recurrent tense errors reflecting the structure of their transitional competence or what S. Pit Corder (1976, p.15) labels idiosyncratic dialect. The justification behind this study is those adopted following Corder (1976, p1), who mentions that two justifications are essentially relevant for the study of learners' errors, one of which is the pedagogical justification, which implies that eliminating any error requires a good understanding of the nature of that error. The research follows a comprehensive analysis methodology. It combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze samples from Iraqi male-female EFL learners. The study found that there are several cross-gender differences concerning the recurrent errors, which might be attributed to several factors, i.e. linguistic and sociolinguistic. The study takes these factors as the building blocks for suggesting pedagogical solutions. The study was originally an attempt to help EFL learners eliminate such recurrent L1\L2 conflicting errors.