ERROR ANALYSIS OF WRITTEN ESSAYS OF OMANI EFL STUDENTS

Abstract

This study investigated the linguistic errors made by Omani EFL students in their written essays at a discourse level. A descriptive research method was utilized to gather information from twenty-five EFL undergraduate students’ essays, which were selected purposively to identify the linguistic errors from an error analysis viewpoint. The result shows that there are 15 linguistic errors found in the students’ essays which are caused by interlingual and intralingual interferences. The result also exhibited that of 15 linguistics errors, spelling (88%), capitalization (80%), and punctuation errors (72%) are the most serious. This indicates that these errors are mechanical in nature, which is the topmost error with 51.12% when grouped into the classification of errors due to the influence of the mother tongue. This implies that participants’ mother tongue (L1) contributed significantly to the mechanical errors committed. It can be gleaned that the participants are ignorant of the rules and restrictions on the proper use of punctuation and capitalization, as well as the rules on how to write the words correctly. Article visualizations: