Investigating the Interlingual Errors in Students’ Essay: The Case of Error Classification

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to identify the most frequently observed interlingual errors in the corpus under the study and the possible relationship between the gender and the type of interlingual errors. The results of this study revealed that the most frequently observed interlingual errors in the corpus under the study are spelling, word order, and punctuation errors and there is significant relationship between the gender and the type of interlingual errors (L1 interference and spelling, word order, and punctuation errors) on the basis of the obtained results for EFL learners. Accordingly based on the results it can be concluded that there is a relationship between interlingual errors and gender since the findings revealed that first, female participants make more spelling, word order, and punctuation errors (65%) by overlooking the writing system rules in the target language compared to the male participants (35%). Second, the results of the study confirm that female participants make more literal translation errors (55%) by translating his first language sentence or idiomatic expression in to the target language word by word compared to the male participants (45%).