Effect of Categorizing EFL Shaqra University Students' Writing Errors on Writing Improvement

Islam Majzoub

doi:10.47577/tssj.v26i1.5227

Abstract

This paper aims at using a strategy of categorizing EFL Shaqra University students' writing errors and identifying its effect in improving students' writing. The study hypothesized that categorizing students' errors into main headings related to the types of error, frequencies of error, examples of errors, and causes of errors will provide precise insight into the nature of students' errors. Moreover, providing students with models to read and extract the difficult vocabularies from them, understanding their meanings, and using them in their writing will improve students' writing. Hence, the researcher gave 65 female students a title to write about in lecture number one as a pre-test. The title was "women driving in Saudi Arabia", and in lecture number eleven, she gave them a post-tester in the same title after applying the hypothesized teaching strategy. The findings of students' essay analysis in the pre-test proved that students had many grammatical and lexical mistakes but in the post-test the students writing improved significantly in terms of style, diction, developing ideas, spelling, and punctuation. Even their errors decreased from 936 errors in the pre-test to 57 errors in the post-test which indicates the success of the teaching strategy adopted by the researcher. Accordingly, the researcher recommended that: firstly, instructors should categorize their students' writing errors to have a clear insight into the nature of their students' errors hence specifying much time in explaining the areas of students' weaknesses. Secondly, instructors should provide students with a well-written model to read; and then ask them to criticize those reading models. The students will learn through criticizing and imitating the style of reading models. Moreover, the instructors of Shaqraa should specify much time explaining morphology since it was the branch that the students make many errors in it.

Highlights

Writing is a vital skill in learning, if our students succeed in writing effectively, they will be able to express their needs and ideas
After the analysis of data, the main findings showed that the grammatical errors were the most typical types of error among students, besides lack of practice was responsible for most learners' errors so the intense practice could be one of the solutions to students' problems in writing
As a result of the findings, the researcher suggested some recommendations; the most prominent one is that teachers should pay more attention to grammatical errors, especially morphology since it is the area in which most of the students make errors

Summary

Introduction

Writing is a vital skill in learning, if our students succeed in writing effectively, they will be able to express their needs and ideas. Raimes (1983) points out that writing is a valuable part of any language course because of the close relationship between writing and thinking. She identified the different components for producing a clear, fluent, and effective writing piece: content, the writer's process, audience, purpose, word choice, organization, mechanics, grammar, and style. A learner needs to write coherently but correctly and cohesively, which requires some time and effort This difficulty in writing leads learners to be more susceptible to make errors. It has been noticed that most Saudi university students make errors in their writing

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Discussion

Conclusion