An Exploration of Grammatical Errors in Written English of Libyan EFL Students with Special Reference to Arabic as their First-Language

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (7) ◽  
pp. 07-25
Author(s):  
Ahmed Sanoussi Himeda Al Jawad ◽  
Asma Abdalrahman Mansour
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
First Language ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Form Errors ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Teaching Grammar

This study focuses on an exploration of grammatical errors in written English of Libyan EFL students with special reference to Arabic as their first language. One of the most important factors that negatively affect EFL students' writing is grammatical errors. Several studies have looked at grammatical errors made by learners of English as a foreign language. Some studies have reported that L1 interference has been indicated as an important factor in the commission of such errors. The current study explores the phenomenon of EFL learners making grammatical errors. It also examines whether the time spent learning English and using English in daily life positively affects a student's writing (fewer grammatical errors appear). In addition, it examines whether first language interference leads to errors by Arab learners in particular. Data was collected from 30 EFL participants studying in Faculty of Arts and Sciences Kufrah- Benghazi University by writing an essay, in English, about the students themselves, their families, and the cities where they live in. The subjects also answered a Grammar Recognition Test. The results of this study indicated that the subjects made 205 errors in 10 different grammatical areas, the highest number of errors found in using articles, the second was word/verb form errors, whereas the third was preposition-related errors. Furthermore, errors of active and passive voice, plural, word order, tense, 3rd person morpheme, and copula “be”. The analysis of these results indicated that the appearance of these errors was more common among learners who have less time learning the language as well as who use the language less in their daily life. Furthermore, the results also revealed that Arab EFL learners tend to translate directly from Arabic to English; in this case, L1 interference appears to be a reason for committing grammatical errors by the Arabs. Moreover, students 'lack of competence in English plays an important role in such an occurrence. The study concludes by giving some suggestions for teaching grammar and reducing the occurrence of errors in this area.

scholarly journals AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ ERRORS IN TRANSFORMING ACTIVE TO PASSIVE SENTENCE

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-60
Author(s):  
Lina Septianasari
Keyword(s):  
First Language ◽  
Private University ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Passive Sentence ◽  
English Students ◽  
Made In

Passive voice is one of the important English grammar that should be mastered because it is used at formal and informal communication. The EFL students tend to produce grammatical errors in transforming active to the passive sentence because of syntactical interference of their first language. The objectives of this research are to know the types of errors that students made in transforming active to passive sentences, to know the students' problems in transforming active to passive sentences and to know the proportion of the students' errors. The subject of this research is 20 English students at one private university in Lampung. The result of this research shows that the total number of errors that had been committed by the students based on surface strategy taxonomy is 280 errors, which falls into the following proportion of the four kinds of errors in surface strategy taxonomy: 126 errors of omission error, 18 errors of addition error, 120 errors of misformation error, and 16 errors of misordering error.

scholarly journals Common Grammatical Errors in Written Discourse of EFL Iraqi Learners

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Doaa Faris Al-shammery ◽  
Azar Huesiani ◽  
Hesamoddin Shahriari
Keyword(s):  
First Language ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Written Production ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Linguistic System ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
The Common

The current study was an attempt to explore the common grammatical errors in written discourse of EFL Iraqi learners across gender. To this end, five male and five female Iraqi EFL academic learners with the same proficiency level were randomly selected. The participants were supposed to write a descriptive composition on a common topic.  Findings showed Iraqi EFL learners made various errors in the following categories including tenses, prepositions, articles, active and passive voice, verbs and morphological error. It has been  found that most of these errors caused by the effect of grammatical and linguistic system of participants’ first language on their written production of the target language.

scholarly journals EXPLORING ENGLISH LISTENING PROBLEMS AMONG EFL STUDENTS AT IAIN KUDUS

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Azizah Maulina Erzad
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Listening Comprehension ◽  
English Education ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Education Department ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Listening Process

Listening comprehension becomes one of the most difficult skills for most of English learners especially EFL learners. As a foreign language, English is rarely used in communication by EFL learners in their daily life. Therefore, the learners or students always face some difficulties/problems in listening comprehension. It can be seen from the results of their tests. The purpose of this study is to investigate the problems occur in listening class of EFL students at IAIN Kudus and the solutions to overcome those problems. The EFL students in this study refer to the English Education Department students of IAIN Kudus. The participants of this study are the second semester of English Education Department students. This study is a qualitative research. Observation, interview and documentation were conducted to collect the data. By conducting this study, several problems in listening comprehension can be revealed. The listening problems encountered by the EFL students are the pronunciation (accents), speedy delivery and length of the listening, physical conditions, unfamiliar vocabularies and terminologies, and limited facility for listening. Some actions should be done to overcome these obstacles occurred during listening process. The solutions to overcome the problems are students should be focus, practice more in listening English, memorize vocabularies, and prepare a language laboratory.

scholarly journals Grammatical Errors on EFL Students’ Final Project Writings

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-25
Author(s):  
Zewitra ◽  
Poppy Fauziah
Keyword(s):  
Error Analysis ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Final Project ◽  
Analysis Process ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Grammatical Error ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Made In

Making errors is an unavoidable part of learning a new language, especially for those who do not use that new language as their first medium of communication. Writing in a foreign language can be a considerably tough challenge for EFL learners, one of the problems is regarding the grammatical rules. This present study attempts to discover and analyze the grammatical errors found in EFL students’ final project writing. It employed a descriptive qualitative method using a textual analysis process by adopting the theory of Dulay et al regarding grammatical error analysis. (Dulay et al., 1982) classify grammatical errors into four; omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. Five students’ final projects with a total number of 2884 sentences became the object of this research. The final projects were taken from Politeknik Negeri Bandung (Polban) English Department graduates of 2018 and they were limited to the project of ‘Travel Writing’ only. Travel Writing was chosen due to the fact that it contains more various types of sentences, more complicated sentence structure, and higher level of language modification. The results of this study claim that all types of grammatical errors presented by Dulay et al are found in those five students’ final projects. Misformation is the most frequent error the students made in producing their travel writing products by 74% (380 out of 516 errors) while misordering is the least one by 1% (7 out of 516 errors). Theoretically, the findings can be a base for the next researchers to further analyze the cause of this error production. Meanwhile, practically the results can be used by curriculum makers as a guide to evaluate and develop new curriculum, syllabus, materials, and teaching methods which are more suitable for EFL students in order to communicate effectively and write skillfully.   Keywords: error analysis, grammatical error, writing, travel writing  

scholarly journals Learner Corpus and Academic Writing: Identifying the Error Patterns of Taiwanese EFL Students

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Hsiao-I Hou
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Curriculum Design ◽  
Writing Curriculum ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Learner Corpus ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Lexical Errors

<p>The purpose of this study is to find practical implications for improving academic writing curriculum design by exploring lexical and grammatical errors produced by EFL learners in a vocational institution in Taiwan. To satisfy this purpose, a small learner corpus was compiled in this study. The data were obtained from 58 undergraduate students of a public vocational university from September 2012 to June 2013 in Taiwan. There are 112 essays in the corpus that include 34,426 tokens. Learner errors were annotated based on the error categories found in (Dagneaux et al, 1996). Transfer errors and intralingual errors were analyzed. Lexical Tutor and AntConc software were used to conduct the analyses. Lexical errors, including incorrect word choices, misspellings, and word insertions, deletions or replacements occurred primarily due to students’ insufficient mastery of vocabulary. The top three grammatical errors were verb forms, article errors, and preposition errors. Based on the research results, pedagogical implications that focus on teaching EAP writing to vocational university students in Taiwan are discussed.</p>

scholarly journals The Effect of English Passive Voice Learning on the Use of “Bei” Structure: An Empirical Study

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 197
Author(s):  
Min Cao
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
English Proficiency ◽  
First Language ◽  
L2 Proficiency ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Sentence Level ◽  
L1 And L2

<p>This paper conducts an empirical investigation among English foreign language (EFL) learners at a university in China, mainly on their understanding of the passive voice in their native language to verify the existence of backward transfer in their first language (L1) environment and how backward transfer may relate to the learners’ proficiency of second language (L2) English and L1 Chinese in the sentence translation task (STT) and discourse task (DT) of Chinese paragraph writing. The study shows that backward transfer does exist at STT or sentence level in L1 environment. Additionally, the Chinese participants at intermediate English proficiency level are likely to experience backward transfer from L2 English to L1 Chinese. Moreover, for EFL learners at the lower and top English proficiency level no obvious signs of backward transfer shown at the sentence level. And all of the EFL participants have not been influenced by L2 English in the Chinese discourse task. The results of this study convey the complexity of backward transfer and its interactions with L1 and L2 proficiency and different tasks.</p>

scholarly journals Students' Grammatical Errors in Composing English Passive Sentences

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 588-601
Author(s):  
Siska Bochari ◽  
, Afrillia Anggreni ◽  
Maf’ulah Maf’ulah
Keyword(s):  
English Education ◽  
First Language ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Sentence Patterns ◽  
Auxiliary Verb ◽  
Constituent Elements

Students in learning English grammar often experience difficulties, and are influenced by the first language, namely Indonesian. Students are influenced by the first language, Indonesian, in composing passive sentences and changing active sentences into passive sentences without first identifying the tense used. The students' difficulties in composing passive sentences resulted in difficulties in writing text properly. This is because most students do not understand how to change the active voice to the passive voice, use auxiliary verbs, and identify the tense. The study uses descriptive qualitative method that aims to analyze errors in the preparation of English passive sentences made by the 4th semester students of the English Education Study Program, Tadulako University. In arranging the passive form and which passive form is the most difficult for students to understand and after analyzing the students' mistakes in composing passive sentences, the researchers concluded that of the 50 students who became respondents, the problems that students make in composing passive sentences are 1) changing word order caused by not being able to distinguish between subject and object, 2) not understanding the tense used in active sentences resulting in a change in the auxiliary verb form, 3) reducing or eliminating one of the constituent elements passive, such as the BY preposition, auxiliary verb be, or the suffix –ED to the regular verb. 4) generalizing all passive sentence patterns. Type of error becoming the most dominant thing that students do in making noun clauses is misordering, which is changing the position of the subject and the object without considering the passive patterns and verbs that the sentence has. Next, the passive voice which is the most difficult for students to make is that they had difficulty in constructing passive sentences using the main sentence HAVE or GET followed by a non-finite verb (past participle).

scholarly journals Saudi EFL Students’ Production of Conventional Expressions in Second Language Pragmatics

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 260-274
Author(s):  
Afnan Almegren
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
First Language ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
The Status ◽  
Efl Students

This study compared and explored the differences and similarities in the production of conventional expressions between native English speakers and non-native English speakers represented by the Saudi EFL learners. It also examined the pragma-linguistic differences in the production of conventional expressions. Forty-seven native English speakers and forty-seven non-native English speakers participated in this study. The questionnaire consisted of nineteen scenarios representing different speech acts. Students were requested to reply to these scenarios as if they were real-life situations. The findings established that almost half of the comparisons between Saudi EFL learners and native English speakers presented similarities in the production of conventional expressions. However, there were some pragma-linguistic differences between the native English speakers and some of the Saudi EFL learners, such as misunderstandings due to the misuse of expected expressions, verbosity, the use of expressions that formal speakers considered rude, and transferred from their first language. These findings provide an empirical vision to the status of Saudi EFL learners conventional expressions. Future research could investigate conventional EFL expressions locally and globally.

scholarly journals Grammatical Error Made by EFL Learners of STIBA Persada Bunda in Thesis Proposal

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-135
Author(s):  
Maspufah
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
First Language ◽  
Communication Strategy ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Descriptive Research ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Rule Application ◽  
Grammatical Error

Writing is regarded as one of difficult skill in learning English because it needs more effort to elaborate a complex process of generating, organizing, and revising ideas on a paper. Since English is not students’ mother tongue, error might be occurred in their writing. This research was intended to identify the types and the causes of error made by EFL learners of STIBA Persada Bunda in thesis proposal. It was a descriptive research. Thirteen students from the eighth semester of 2018-2019 academic years were taken for the sample. The instruments used to collect the data were in quantitative and qualitative form. Students’ thesis proposals were taken for quantitative data. Interview was used for qualitative data. The result showed that there were four types of grammatical error found in EFL learners’ thesis proposal: addition, omission, misformation, and misordering. The Errors in their thesis proposal were caused by three conditions: inter-lingual, intra-lingual, and communication strategy-based error. Inter-lingual occurred because of first language interfere when transferring from first language to target lnguage. Intra-lingual occurred in the incomplete rule application and exploiting redundancy. Avoidance caused communication strategy-based error. It could be concluded that EFL learners’ competence in writing needed to be improved as there were many grammatical errors occurred in their thesis proposal.

scholarly journals The cross-linguistic influence of Arabic on the English passive voice

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 182-190
Author(s):  
Fatma Ali Lghzeel ◽  
Noor Raha Mohd Radzuan
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
First Language ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
Target Language ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
L1 Transfer ◽  
Efl Learners

It is difficult to describe cross-linguistic influence; however, it has been a contentious phenomenon for a long time. Whenever the speaker of a language becomes bilingual, the first language will subtly affect the new one, even if it is not used much. This is how first language influence begins since the majority of Arab English as a foreign language (EFL) learners suffer from this problem. This current research aims to study the negative influence of the native language (Arabic) on utilising the English passive voice. In this article, we aim to discover the levels of Arab EFL learners’ knowledge of the passive voice, as well as to examine the percentage of interlingual and intralingual errors. This study applies a quantitative method. Forty-six participants, who are Arab EFL learners studying at the Universiti Malaysia Pahang, engaged in the task of answering a grammar test. To conclude, the results show that Arab students have a high rate of L1 transfer on the English passive voice, and their levels of knowledge of passive voice are identified. The researchers recommend mixed methods for further research in order to provide a wider understanding about this issue.   Keywords: English as a foreign language, mother tongue, native language, target language.

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