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.
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Date
2015
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Publisher
University Mouloud Mammeri 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.
Description
64p.:ill;30cm.(+cd)
Keywords
Error analysis, error comparison, interlanguage, fossilization.
Citation
Language and Communication