Subject-verb Agreement Errors Research Articles

COMMON GRAMMATICAL ERRORS FOUND IN STUDENTS’ WRITING

This study aimed at exploring the types of common grammatical errors are found in the students’ writing and finding out the dominant type of common grammatical errors found in students’ writing. This study used descriptive qualitative and quantitative method. The data were taken from the 21 compositions of students who took Basic Writing Class in English Letter Study Program, Faculty of Language and Literature of Flores University. Each writing has three kinds of writing. They are about family member, individual favorite object, and natural objects descriptions. The upshots of the study indicates there are 9,1% students who made errors in verb tense, 12,6% students who made errors in subject-verb agreement, 15,3% students made error in article, 4,5% students made error in preposition, 6,3% students made error in number, 4,5% students made error in pronoun, 1,8% students made error in possessive, 1,8% students made in word choice, 11,7% students made error in spelling, 19,8% students made error in word order, 7,2% students made error in capitalization, and 5,4% students made error in punctuation. The errors are caused from many factors; the students are still confused to choose the right word in a sentence because of the lack of knowledge or poor vocabularies and its use. Besides, errors happened because of their first language (Indonesian logical thinking), or we could say the learners’ mother tongue interference (interlingua source), some students tried to translate the words one by one from Indonesian language into English without paying attention to the English structure rules.
 

The The Students’ Problems in Learning of Subject Verb Agreement Towards The Third Grade Students of University of Muhammadiyah Tangerang

This study aims to find out the subject and verb writing errors made by students majoring in English Education at Universitas Muhammadiyah Tangerang when they complete paragraphs in verb form. Error analysis technique was conducted in this study to find the errors faced by the students in terms of present tense, identify the types of errors as well as the sources of errors. This study is descriptive research with 10 students participating in this study. The data of this study were collected from 1) students' writings focusing on students' sentences containing subject-verb agreement errors, and 2) interviews obtained from the students. The findings of this study are as follows: Subject and verb errors made by students cover form of information, omission, and addition errors, while from the point of view of linguistic categorization, the errors made by students are in the form of using singular plural nouns placed as subjects, improper use of verbs, and improper use of verbal and nominal sentences in making present tense sentences. The analyzed data also shows that students' errors in subject-verb agreement are classified as local errors. The cognitive strategies were chosen by them in comprehending the grammar

An Analysis of Negative Transfer Made by Chinese Non-English Major Students in IELTS Writing Task 2

The phenomenon of negative transfer between languages has been a hot topic in second language acquisition. It can have an important impact on students' second language acquisition. Understanding the phenomenon of negative transfer through errors that occur during language learning can better regulate language acquisition in the process of second language learning and improve students' cognition of second language acquisition. The writing part of the IELTS test is a major difficulty for Chinese non-English majors to overcome. Then understanding the negative transfer phenomenon that occurs in their writing process is particularly important for them to improve their scores. This research is dedicated to the research and analysis of the types of errors and the reasons why Chinese non-English major students make mistakes in IELTS writing task 2. The study found that Chinese non-English major students experienced negative transfer between languages in IELTS writing task 2, which resulted in four main types of errors, namely errors in subject-verb agreement, double-predicate errors, and errors in tense of verbs and incomplete sentence structure. By summarizing and analyzing the types of errors caused by these negative transfers, this research hopes to provide corresponding guidance and inspiration for IELTS writing teaching and English writing for non-English major students.

A preliminary investigation into student writers’ perception of corrective feedback focus

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether second language student writers’ perception or lack of perception of targeted error type influences corrective feedback effectiveness. The targeted linguistic error type in this study involved subject-verb agreement errors. Thirty-six college students from northern Taiwan were assigned into one control group without receiving error correction, one experimental group receiving error correction without perceiving the targeted error type, and another experimental group receiving error correction and perceiving the targeted error type. The results showed that when student writers received corrections and perceived the subject-verb agreement errors as the targeted error type, they made more improvements than those who received corrections but did not perceive the targeted error type in immediate posttests. Furthermore, the learning benefit of student writers’ perception of corrective feedback focus was retained in delayed posttests. Student writers who received the corrections and perceived the targeted error type of subject-verb agreement errors significantly outperformed not only those who received corrections but did not perceive the targeted error type but also those who did not receive corrections in terms of learning gains in delayed posttests. Implications for the present study for the written corrective feedback research community were discussed.

An Analysis of the Grammatical Errors in the Written English Compositions of JSS 1 Pupils in Five Junior Secondary Schools in Bo City, Southern Sierra Leone

This study focuses on the grammatical errors in the essays written by JSS1 pupils in five junior secondary schools in Bo city. It aims at identifying the errors occurring in the use English grammar by pupils, classifying the errors, determining their frequency levels and their sources. The descriptive survey design was used in this study, where out of a population of 853 pupils, 250 pupils were used a sample for this study. Each of the pupils was asked to write an essay, and the scripts were marked to identify all grammatical errors made by the pupils. From this study, it was discovered that out of 250 scripts, 32% of the pupils were not able to communicate their thoughts meaningfully. Out of the comprehensible scripts the following errors were identified and their frequencies: wrong use of tense 29.54%, errors in spelling 24.67%, errors in the choice of words 13.13%, wrong use of prepositions 7.79%, verb addition errors 5.84%, preposition addition errors 4.87%, pronoun addition, subject-verb agreement errors, wrong use of pronouns, plural and verb omission errors all received 1.62% each. The study further revealed that a good number of errors discovered from students’ writings were intralingual errors.

Error analysis in the middle test of Writing Post-Basic written by the third semester of English education department Universitas PGRI Madiun year 2021/2022

Writing is one of the important English skills. The process to make good writing is difficult. There were errors in the writing process. Therefore, the researcher was interested in analyzing the kinds of errors in writing. The problem of this study is to identify the errors made by the third-semester students of English education department at Universitas PGRI Madiun in the academic year 2021/2022. A descriptive qualitative method is used to analyze this research. The researcher analyzed subject-verb agreement errors, verb tense errors, verb form errors, singular/plural noun ending errors, and word form errors. The steps to finding the data are: collecting the sources of the data, understanding the content of the writing, selecting the test which contains errors, analyzing the collected data, and drawing conclusions. The result of this research, from the lowest to the highest, is as follows: singular/plural noun ending errors (3.40%), subject-verb agreement errors (12.24%), verb form errors (13.61%), verb tense errors (30.61%), and the highest error is word form errors (40.14%). The suggestion of the researcher for the next researcher, there are still many aspects that can be analyzed from other kinds of errors and analyzing other skills of English such as reading, speaking, and listening concerned in the errors aspect.

GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN ACADEMIC WRITING OF ENGLISH SECOND-YEAR STUDENTS

The study aimed to analyze the common grammatical errors of students in academic writing. Mixed-method research was implemented for this study. The study team gathered 110 essays from learners in the Writing Course 4 – Social Texts classroom. Then, the researchers conducted interviews with 23 learners in order to ascertain the reasons behind their grammatical errors in writing and provide suitable remedies. Participants in this research were second-year students majoring in English Studies in the Department of English Language and Culture's High-Quality Program at a Vietnamese university. The findings revealed that the errors that made up the biggest percentage of all errors were those involving the articles (25,5 %), prepositions (14,2%), and plural/singular forms (13,7 %). On the other hand, tenses (7%), passive voice (3,8%), and subject-verb agreement (1,7%) errors had the respective lowest percentages. The results of the interviews with 23 randomly selected students in this course showed that students struggled with academic writing on a number of different levels, with the root causes being a lack of vocabulary knowledge, carelessness, and uncertainty about basic grammatical structure.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0124/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

An Automatic Error Detection Method for Engineering English Translation Based on the Deep Learning Model

Accuracy of deep learning model translation is a key index to evaluate the application performance of engineering English translation. In this paper, an automatic error detection system for English translation is proposed. In the particular task of grammar detection, researchers have gradually shifted their attention from statistical methods to neural network methods. Three deep learning algorithm models are established, and the multitask performance of the model is better than that of the conditional random field model and the LSTM-CRF model. The reason is that the multitask learning model of auxiliary tasks is included to some extent, which solves the problem of data sparsity and enables the model to be fully trained even under the condition of uneven label distribution. Thus, it performs better than other models in the task of syntax error detection. It realizes the word spelling error check based on the dictionary and uses the thought of editing distance to prompt the word error found, which can automatically check a large number of translations. On the basis of analyzing the sentence structure characteristics of engineering English translation, this paper realizes the detection of subject-verb agreement errors and analyzes the main word of the subject corresponding to the predicate verb by constructing the syntactic structure tree of the sentence, so as to realize the judgment of subject-verb agreement errors.

Subject-Verb Agreement Errors and Performance of the Bachelor of Arts in English Language Studies (BAELS) Students: An Input for the Development of A Remediation Program

The researcher examined the subject-verb agreement errors made by the forty (40) Guimaras State College BAELS students in the second semester of the school year 2021-2022 using a descriptive research design. The test-retest was performed on thirty (30) Bachelor of Science in Criminology students of the Guimaras State College—as pilot participants. Calculating the error rates gave an overall impression of subject-verb agreement rules. The subject-verb agreement errors did not differ by sex or year for BAELS students, whose academic performance varied by year, but had an effect on the BAELS students’ performance. The subject-verb agreement is difficult for students, especially with certain indefinite pronouns which take a singular verb, compound subjects joined by “and” which require a plural verb, in compound affirmative and negative subjects, where the verb agrees with the positive subjects, and compound subjects connected by coordinating conjunctions which require number and person agreement between the verb and the closest subject. The Guimaras State College may sponsor an English language remediation program to improve student competency. Future researches may highlight that students’ English proficiency may be affected by finances, parents’ occupations, and living on a small island, and teachers can alter how students regard English as a second language. Keywords: Subject-verb agreement, error, BAELS, enhancement program

Effects of Written Corrective Feedback on College EFL Students’ Writing Accuracy and Linguistic Knowledge Acquisition

Abstract Set at the interface between second language acquisition and second language writing, this study examines how different types of written corrective feedback (WCF) influence the writing accuracy of Chinese college students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and whether WCF facilitates the students’ grasp of the focused linguistic knowledge. The participants (n = 60) were divided into direct correction group (n = 20), indirect error-coding group (n = 20) and metalinguistic explanation group (n = 20). The three groups wrote four essays in two months and received WCF for the first three essays on the five targeted error types, namely tense errors, confusion of different forms of a word, word (articles, prepositions, etc.) missing, errors in subject-verb agreement and inappropriate verb-noun collocations. The results show that all three types of WCF improved students’ writing accuracy but none of them had any statistical advantage, and the metalinguistic WCF was more effective than the other two forms in facilitating the acquisition of the targeted linguistic features. These results shed some light on teaching and consolidation of language points through writing in EFL contexts.

ERROR TYPES IN SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT

The aim of this study is to identify the types of errors in subject-verb agreement. The basic mistakes made by students in subject-verb agreements are a lack of knowledge about sentence patterns and their types. The study applied a qualitative descriptive method. The study is to describe and classify the errors made by the students and identify which parts of the subject-verb agreement have the most errors. The data collection technique of this study is by collecting the results of a worksheet assessment on subject-verb agreement given to 89 students. The data is analyzed by investigating what types of errors the students make and what factors often occur in subject-verb agreement. The results of this indicate that there are errors made by students including: singular subject must agree with a singular verb as well as a plural subject must agree with a plural verb, errors in a compound subject, errors in using the verb of the form have, and errors in be verb. The study implies that grammar and sentence construction, particularly subject-verb agreements, are basic chapters that must be trained continuously and become an important fundamental goal before students learn other things in English.

SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT ERRORS IN THE NARRATIVE WRITING OF THE FIRST SEMESTER OF ENGLISH LITERATURE STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY

Abstract
 This study aimed at identifying the subject-verb agreement errors in 15 students’ narrative writing of the first semester of English literature. Descriptive qualitative method was used in conducting this study. The data of the study were collected through the use of The Pear Film as the instrument. The data obtained through the instrument were analyzed by classifying the errors into rules of Subject Verb Agreement(SVA) proposed by Azar (2003). The result of data analysis showed that error on the singular subject takes singular verb was 35 sentences. It was followed by plural subject takes a plural verb 6 sentences, sometimes phrases come between a subject and a verb. These phrases do not affect the agreement of the subject and verb 3 sentences, There + be + subject 3 sentences and collective nouns 2 sentences. Based on these findings, it is suggested to the teachers of English to use many various teaching methodologies to help the students understand the SVA rules and apply them in their studies.
 Key words: subject verb agreement, error, narrative, writing.

Does one size fit all? The scope and type of error in direct feedback effectiveness

Abstract This study is an attempt to investigate the scope and type of error in feedback effectiveness. This study consists of two experiments. One was conducted to investigate the feedback effects on a rule-based error type (i.e. subject–verb agreement errors) and the other was conducted to investigate the effects on a lexically-based error type (i.e. verb–noun collocation errors). In addition, the scope of error was investigated in both experiments. In terms of the rule-based error type, results for the immediate posttest writing task showed focused feedback to be effective for the narrowly defined subject–verb agreement errors (i.e. subject–verb agreement involving lexical verbs or copula be). In the delayed posttest writing task, the benefit still persisted for the narrowly defined subject–verb agreement errors. In terms of the lexically-based error type, results for the immediate posttest writing tasks showed focused feedback to be effective for the broadly defined verb–noun collocation errors (three or four collocation errors made and corrected in pretests). In the delayed posttest writing tasks, the benefit still persisted for the broadly defined verb–noun collocation errors broadly defined. These findings suggest that the notion of error type should influence the feedback effectiveness. Theoretical implications regarding the role of notice in the second language acquisition process were discussed based on the results obtained in this study.

Children Treat Grammatical Errors Differently for Native and Non-Native Speakers.

Both children and adults demonstrate biases against non-native speakers. However, in some situations, adults act more generously towards non-native speakers than towards native speakers. In particular, adults judge errors from non-native speakers less harshly, presumably because they expect such errors. In the present study, we asked whether 5-6-year-old children place less weight on errors from speakers with a foreign accent. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 80) listened to pairs of either native or foreign-accented speakers (between-subjects) label objects. For native speaker pairings, children preferred information provided by grammatical speakers over information from speakers who made subject-verb agreement errors. In contrast, children chose between foreign-accented speakers at chance. In Experiment 2 (N = 40), children preferred information from grammatical foreign-accented speakers over information from foreign-accented speakers who produced word-order violations. These findings constitute the first demonstration that children treat speech errors differently based on a speaker’s language background.

Surface Structure Taxonomy on Journal Texts: The Case of Filipino ESL Learners

Errors in the subject-verb agreement are the most common problems among elementary learners in an English as Second Language (ESL) class. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the types of errors committed by the twelve (12) Grade 6 pupils in Hadiyyah International School, Marawi City, Philippines, and the most prevalent errors of the participants. The study employed a descriptive research design that explored the subject-verb agreement errors in the participants’ two-month written journal. Using Dulay, Burt, and Krashen’s Surface Strategy Taxonomy, these errors were categorized as Omission, Addition, Misordering, and Misformation. Findings show that 198 errors were found and that four types of errors were identified: Omission (12.5%), Addition (11.5%), Misordering (3%), and Misformation (73%). The study reveals that the most prevalent error committed by the participants is misformation. Moreover, the researcher discovered simpler sub-types of these errors. This study concludes that it is possible for the learners to commit multiple errors in a sentence, as reflected in the current study. These results suggest a call for language teachers to systematically diagnose their learners and revisit their teaching approach that corresponds to the learner’s needs. Effective methods in teaching grammar, especially at the elementary level, should be practised by language teachers to prevent fossilization and the difficulty of un-learning the learner’s prior wrong perception of the grammatical rules.

REVISITING THE WRITTEN SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT OF THE ELEVENTH GRADERS ON DESCRIPTIVE TEXT: SURFACE STRATEGY ANALYSIS


 
 
 Many studies examining the subject-verb agreement errors in students’ writing have been conducted; however, it still needs further exploration to revisit students' success in writing a text. The objectives of this study are analyzing students' errors related to the subject- verb agreement and revisiting the success of students in writing a descriptive text. To achieve those purposes, a total of 36 students from the eleventh class Accounting 5 from SMKN 2 Kediri were asked to write descriptive text on the topic provided. In addition, the researcher also conducted interviews with the teacher and several students. The findings showed that the participants contributed three types of subject-verb agreement errors in their descriptive writing, those were omission (38%), addition (8%) and misformation (54%), then misordering error was not found in this research. It was also revealed that students are also successful in writing descriptive texts in terms of using general structures, language features, tense, and quantifiers in writing descriptive text.
 
 

PIPS: A Parallel Planning Model of Sentence Production.

Subject-verb agreement errors are common in sentence production. Many studies have used experimental paradigms targeting the production of subject-verb agreement from a sentence preamble (The key to the cabinets) and eliciting verb errors (… *were shiny). Through reanalysis of previous data (50 experiments; 102,369 observations), we show that this paradigm also results in many errors in preamble repetition, particularly of local noun number (The key to the *cabinet). We explore the mechanisms of both errors in parallelism in producing syntax (PIPS), a model in the Gradient Symbolic Computation framework. PIPS models sentence production using a continuous-state stochastic dynamical system that optimizes grammatical constraints (shaped by previous experience) over vector representations of symbolic structures. At intermediate stages in the computation, grammatical constraints allow multiple competing parses to be partially activated, resulting in stable but transient conjunctive blend states. In the context of the preamble completion task, memory constraints reduce the strength of the target structure, allowing for co-activation of non-target parses where the local noun controls the verb (notional agreement and locally agreeing relative clauses) and non-target parses that include structural constituents with contrasting number specifications (e.g., plural instead of singular local noun). Simulations of the preamble completion task reveal that these partially activated non-target parses, as well the need to balance accurate encoding of lexical and syntactic aspects of the prompt, result in errors. In other words: Because sentence processing is embedded in a processor with finite memory and prior experience with production, interference from non-target production plans causes errors.

The Effect of English Language Proficiency Level on Undergraduate Libyan Students’ Use of Subject Verb Agreement

This study aims to examine the proficiency level of Libyan EFL (English as a Foreign Language) undergraduate students in terms of the types of subject-verb agreement errors they commit. It also attempts to identify, analyze and categorize the frequency errors related to subject-verb agreement into three categories. These errors are statically analyzed and classified into: subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors with third person singular subjects (TPSS), with third person plural subjects (TPPS), with compound subjects (CS). The participants of this study were 40 intermediate and advanced students whose major is English at the Faculty of Arts in Misurata University, Libya. They were chosen based on their level of English language proficiency during the current study. The data of this study were collected through a written test consisting of six short passages. The results showed that the percentage of errors made by both groups was below 30% which refers to non-significant differences among the two groups with respect to the SVA errors made by them. Consequently, it can be concluded that language proficiency has little effect on the participants' use of the SVA rule. It was also found that subject-verb agreement errors with (TPPS) were the least frequent, and the most common errors committed were (CS) and (TPSS). This study is important for EFL teachers to be aware of the subject verb agreement errors that their target learners commonly produce. The implications for SLA research and classroom teaching practice are given for foreign language teachers and researchers.

LEARNERS’ ERRORS IN WRITING THE RECOUNT TEXT

The objective of this research was to identify and to analyze what are kinds of grammatical errors made by the eighth-grade learners when they wrote the recount text. The design of this research was descriptive research design. The population of this research was the 8C learners of SMP Negeri 8 Bogor and the number of the sample was 31 learners. The researcher used three methods for getting the data; they were data from documentation, data from questionnaire, and data from the interview. The result of this research indicated that the 8C learners of SMP Negeri 8 Bogor had poor ability in writing the recount text. The highest percentage errors were made in the simple past tense by 83.8%, the second one was using in subject-verb agreement by 67.7%, the third one was preposition by 32.2%, and the last errors was pronoun 16.1%. Furthermore, based on the result of the questionnaire, most of the learners responded that they felt difficult in constructing grammatical sentences especially in the use past tense and it was appropriate with the result of the learners’ work and the answer of the interview. In the current research, errors in past tense was more dominant than errors in subject verb agreement, errors in preposition, and errors in pronoun.

An Analysis on the Subject-Verb Agreement Errors in Speaking Performance Made by the Second Year Students of English Department Students of UNP

This research aimed at identifying the subject-verb agreement errors in students’ speaking performance, finding out mostly the types of errors in applying the subject-verb agreement also finding out the source of errors made by the second-year students of English department of UNP. This research applied a descriptive qualitative research design with 28 students who participated in this study. The data of the research were collected through a test instrument. The test instrument covers a speaking test in a report form. All of the errors that were identified in subject-verb agreement were analyzing by using Surface Strategy Taxonomy introduced by Dulay et,al. the result of data analysis showed that the students contributed into four types of errors in subject-verb agreement’s term, they are (1) omission (38 errors / 25 %), (2) addition (47 errors / 27%). (3) misformation ( 76 / 45%), (4) misordering (10 errors / 6%). Furthermore, the research also found the sources of errors made by the students during his/her speaking report test, the frequent sources of errors are Intralingual transfer there are totally (100 errors / 57%), Interlingual transfer (45 errors / 25%), communication strategy ( 17 errors / 10 %) and the last one is context of learning ( 14 errors / 8%)