Error analysis of intensive English students' written compositions at the open educational college

Abstract EN

Research in the field of language acquisition reveals that error analysis is one of the central means used to measure foreign language learners' areas of weaknesses.

This research aimed at examining, through an error analysis investigation, the morphological and syntactic errors that student writers made when they wrote in descriptive and narrative genres.

The population of the study consisted of seventy college students attending the intensive English program at the Open Educational College/ Al-Qadisiya Center for the academic year2015-2014.

The basic goal aimed at identifying the most problematic and grammatical areas that students faced in order to construct materials and narrative genres resulted in the same types of errors.

In terms of frequency, syntactic errors were found to be much higher than the morphological ones.

Finally, it was found that the participants had made more errors in the descriptive texts than in the narrative ones.