A Comparative Study of Students’ Writing Errors. A Case Study of First and Third Year Students of the Department of English at Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou.

Abstract

This study is concerned with investigating and comparing some common patterns of the English language writing errors in the first and the third year students’ compositions, at the level of the department of English at Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou. It intends to compare and examine the kinds of errors as well as identify their frequency of occurrence to determine whether there is a significant progress in the students’ writings. To conduct the research; Pit Corder’s (1967) procedures to Error Analysis are adopted to categorize and explain the various error types. In fact, four error categories are selected for the investigation according to the sources behind committing them, namely articles and prepositions; as interlingual errors, while tenses and nouns are classified within the intralingual category. To achieve the intended aim, acorpus of one hundred (100) exam papers in the Written Expression module has been selected randomly from the first and the third year students to be analyzed and compared using the mixed method approach. The latter combines the quantitative and qualitative methods for analysis. The findings of the investigation reveal that the most recurrent errors committed by the two concerned groups are tense-related errors which pertain to the intralingual type. Consequently, the discussion of the outcomes confirms that fossilization is the principal factor that affects the students’ writing process within the interlanguage phase of learning. Indeed, this research shows that junior learners still make serious fossilized errors compared to the freshmen, which indicates that a very weak evolution is deduced after the students’ three year process. Finally, it is concluded that this stagnation is due to the linguistic interference, overgeneralization as well as the incomplete application of the English Grammar rules.