Investigating Linguistic Errors in English Composition: A Case Study of Non-English Department EFL Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Article History classification of errors including grammatical, syntactic, substance, and lexical errors. The results of data analysis discovered that students committed 352 errors in their compositions with the following frequencies: 82 errors in propositions, 32 errors in tenses, 29 errors in articles, 48 errors in subject verb agreements, 37 errors in word order, 17 errors in capitalization, 21 errors in punctuation, 28 errors in spelling, and 58 errors in word choice. Hence, it is concluded that the most difficult linguistic error that students face is prepositions, while the easiest part of linguistic error that poses difficulty for students is capitalization. Contribution/Originality: The paper's primary contribution is finding that Indonesian EFL learners tend to face problems in deciding which prepositions to use in writing. The results showed that almost all types of prepositions were misused by students. Thence, it is important for English teachers in Indonesia to put more emphasis on preposition usage.