Grammatical mistakes in M. A. students' theses written in English : reasons and remedies

Abstract EN

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the grammatical mistakes made by M.A.

students when writing their theses in English.

The paper shows that most M.A.

students make a large number of various types of grammatical mistakes in spite of the fact that they have an English course in their first preparatory year of study.

This course is supposed to provide them with sufficient and adequate knowledge in English.

The discussion of this issue is not based on the assumption that students may make such mistakes when writing their theses, but it is based on concrete evidence represented by samples of these mistakes found in sentences, clauses, phrases and even words extracted from students' theses.

It is quite necessary to tackle such a problem and to find the causes and remedies for such mistakes.

The paper consists of two sections .The first section exposes the above issue with samples of different grammatical mistakes taken from M.A.

theses written by students in the Dept.

of Mathematics, College of Education.

These mistakes are classified according to their seriousness, importance and frequency of occurrence to illustrate the main areas where students have more troubles.

The second section illustrates the reasons behind such mistakes and presents a number of suggestions as remedies for our problem.