Investigating types and sources of subject verb disagreement errors in writing : the case of first year students of English, Badji Mokhtar university-Annaba

Abstract EN

Accuracy in writing is paramount as it leads to better achievement.

Among the features that play a role in its attainment is subject/ verb agreement.

Our study aims at identifying the prevalent types of disagreement between the subject and verb; and the linguistic sources behind its occurrence.

In doing so, data was gathered from an activity given to 163 first year students of English from Annaba University, and corpora of 65 quiz/exam sheets taken from the previous sample.

As for data analysis, we used the quantitative method with the help of the statistical tool “Excel”.

Findings of the activity revealed that the highest error type is notional disagreement; while corpora analysis reported omission error.

Besides, the source of the investigated problem was mostly intralingual.

Therefore, teachers are recommended to implement error analysis to find out the exact types and sources of subject/ verb disagreement error; then, they can devise extensive remedial activities.