Errors made by Arab university students in the use of English punctuation marks

Abstract EN

Samples of English texts written by Arab university students have been examined for punctuation errors.

Errors in the use of the comma and the period were detected and categorized.

Reasons underlying these errors were suggested.

It was concluded, on the basis of an Arabic-English contrastive punctuation survey, that negative transfer from Arabic played a major role in making these errors.

Proposals for further research were put forward at the end.