The Most Common Punctuation Errors Made by the English and the TEFL Majors at An-Najah National University

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the most common punctuation mistakes which the English and the TEFL majors at An-Najah National University make in their writing. To this end, the researcher administered a test to a stratified random sample of 100 students from An-Najah University: 45 males and 55 females from the TEFL Department in the Faculty of Education and the English Department in the Faculty of Arts. The results revealed that the most common errors among the English and the TEFL majors at An-Najah University were: the overuse of comma at the expense of the period, the incorrect use of the capital letter, the wrong use of the quotation marks and the misuse of semicolon respectively. Furthermore, the results indicated that there were no significant differences in the number of punctuation errors due to gender and department; however, the results revealed that there were significant differences in the number of punctuation errors among the participants due to academic level. In the light of the study findings, the researcher recommended that all the teaching staff should overstress the importance of all the punctuation marks in the written and the oral communication courses.