Investigating Error Analysis of EFL University Students in Writing English Essays

The purpose of the present study is to demonstrate the errors in a corpus of 20 essays writtenby EFL university students studying English at Azad University of Farsan. All theparticipants in the study are male students. The instrument used for this study wasparticipants’ written essays in English language. All of the errors in these essays wereidentified and classified into different categorizations. The results show that the EFLuniversity students in this study committed ten common errors. These errors are: (1) verbtense, (2) word order, (3) singular/plural form, (4) subject-verb agreement, (5) doublenegatives, (6) spellings, (7) capitalization, (8) articles (9) sentence fragments and (10)prepositions. On the basis of these results, a group of recommendations to furtherresearch are suggested and some pedagogical implications which might assist ESL/EFLteachers with some helpful suggestions and teaching strategies that will reduce futureproblems regarding writing English essays among Arab learners.

Keywords:

Error analysis , Interlingual , Essays writing , EFL university students