Abstract
Teaching English as a second language has always been a big challenge for teachers who offer their services at non-native settings. Moreover, it has not been less than a challenging for a teacher to teach error-free writing techniques to his or her students. It demands an extensive and untiring efforts to serve this purpose in terms of writing. The teachers in Pakistan always put their extra efforts to address the common grammar mistakes and errors committed by L2 learners in a target language. The study was set to investigate common English language errors made by public and private college students belonging to both urban and rural parts of Sindh, Pakistan. The study found out the most common and apparent grammatical errors in students’ essays including passive voice, verb, tense, subject-verb agreement, prepositions, articles, plurals and auxiliaries. Besides, errors were identified categorically according to their classification. The study involved 60 students and 20 teachers who were free to express their attitudes and opinions towards L2 English writing skills. The findings revealed that there were various grammatical errors between the HSSC students of both urban and rural Sindh. All those errors were due to intra-lingual transfer. The study found out that intra-lingual transfer of errors were more rampant than the inter-lingual ones. In addition, the findings of study showed that the English writing skills of public colleges in Sindh need constant practice and drill. Based on the findings, it is recommended that educators, policymakers as well as ESL teachers can get an invaluable language benefit. Moreover; this study will give teachers an insight to be well prepared before their learners for the target language. Finally, it is hoped that findings of this study would be a greater assistance in developing English writing skills among secondary students in Sindh, Pakistan. Keywords: Error analysis, Assessment, language learning, Language acquisition, English Second language, prepositions, grammatical errors, articles, passives, tenses, frequency of occurrence. DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-14-08 Publication date: July 31 st 2021
Highlights
While www.iiste.org defining incidence, nature, reasons or consequences of unsuccessful process of language learning would prove fruitful for English as a second language (ESL) learners (James, 1998)
Three colleges were selected from rural Sindh and same number was selected from Urban Sindh
This research has found out that the language learners and students belonging to rural Sindh commit far more errors than their urban counter parts
Summary
Learning or writing has got crucial value in our daily life, especially when we talk about second language learning development. We cannot take our written English errors easy as ESL learners cannot improve their writing skills without making errors. That is why errors are considered a back bone of language learning process. On the other hand, grammatical errors have been related to grammatical incorrectness This will give direction to unsuccessful process of language. Focusing on combined skills of learners,the writing skill always gives tough time to English language learners or foreign learners They hardly master the writing skills while learning English as a second language. An ESL learner faces difficulty, specially in the process of essay writing. Ulijn and strother (1995) concludes that the process of writing is considered significant cohesive skills in the development of language learning for the students of second language. In handouts, in writing compositions, in answering questions and in writing experimental reports etc
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