An Analysis of English Grammatical Errors in the Written Essays of the First Year English Students of Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti
- June 24, 2018
- Posted by: RSIS
- Categories: English, Language and Literature
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume II, Issue VI, June 2018 | ISSN 2454-6186
George Adekunle Ojo
Department of English and Literary Studies, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria
Abstract: – This study investigates the grammatical errors in the written essays of the first year English students of Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti. These errors include misinformation, omission, punctuations, capitalization, concord, lexical, spelling, parts of speech, syntactic and articles. Data were collected from 200 first year English students’ essays from the Faculties of Arts and Education out of which 50 of the essays were purposively selected for analysis; twenty-five of which each represent the two faculties (i.e Arts and Education). Frequency and percentage were used for data analysis. Findings in this study showed that the most frequent errors made by the students, out of the 393 errors in the data, were spelling 71 (18.07%), lexical 51 (12.89%), punctuations 49 (12.47%), capitalization 48 (12.21%) and parts of speech 46 (11.70%).
Keywords: Grammatical errors, error analysis, written essays, second language acquisition, first year English students.
I. INTRODUCTION
University students are required to employ the English language whenever they communicate either through spoken or written form when it comes to academic endeavours. More importantly, students of English are expected to strictly consider rules of grammar anytime they engage the English language in their communicative activities; otherwise, there would be communication problem. According to Batstone (1994), using language without considering it’s “grammar would be chaotic and cause the same communication problem, such as grammatical errors in writing and speaking.” Grammar, apart from being the rules for ordering words, it is also a resource for good communication (Halliday and Hasan, 1989 in Hyland, 2002).
The focus of this study is on first year second semester students of English of Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti. First year second semester English undergraduates are students who have been exposed to basics of English grammar not only in their first semester in the university but at various times or the other in their post-primary school days. Therefore, they are expected to have internalised some basic rules of the English grammar. In their essay writing, they are expected to have attained a certain level of competence. In other words, there are some grammatical errors that are not expected to be committed at their level.
