Error Analysis in the Use and Realization of Inflectional Morphemes among EFL University Students

Abstract

This study aims to identify, describe and analyze errors committed in the area of inflectional morphemes by the 3rd year EFL students at the College of Education for humanities, Department of English/ College of Education for Humanities/ University of Mosul, during the academic year 2016-2017,. In order to identify the areas of difficulty and find out what makes these areas difficult, errors are classified with reference to the eight types of inflectional morphemes. To that end, Error Analysis Theory; notably, a fused version of the guidelines offered by Corder (1973) and Ellis (2005), is adopted. The mechanism of applying this version of error analysis on the data collected passes through various analytical stages, starting with data collection, identification of the areas of difficulty, description, explanation, and ending with the evaluation of errors. The present study was conducted to find out students’ errors in using inflectional morphemes that include : past tense inflection “ed1”, plural inflection “s”, present participle inflection “ing”,third person singular “s”, past participle “ed2”,possessive inflection “ ’s ”,comparative “er” and superlative inflection “est”. The aim of this study is to find out the errors made by students in using inflectional morphemes, and most importantly, the type of such errors ; whether they are,errors of omission, addition, misinformation, misordering, or those of blending. The subjects of this study were 100 EFL students in third -year at the university of Mosul. The results of the analysis show that the total number of errors found in the students’ essays is 864.The objective outcome of the analysis conducted reveals a number of findings and conclusions; among these are, the percentage of “ed1” morpheme errors comprised 35% of the total types of errors, the second rank is the plural morpheme “s” errors =17%, the ‘ing” morpheme errors= 14%, the third person singular “s” =13%,”ed2” errors=12%,possessive morpheme errors =7%, Finally the comparative “er” and the superlative “est” comprised the lowest rank of percentage ;that is 1%. Based on the findings of this research, it is hoped that it would help other researchers to build up further discussions and researches on errors with broader aspects and different subjects.