A Linguistic Analysis on Errors Committed by Jordanian EFL Undergraduate Students: A Case of News Headlines in Jordanian Newspapers

Abstract

This study investigated some linguistic errors committed by Jordanian EFL undergraduate students when translating news headlines in Jordanian newspapers from Arabic to English and vice versa. The data of the study was collected through a test composed of (30) English news headlines and (30) Arabic ones covering various areas of news occurring in a large corpus of Jordanian newspapers, i.e., two leading and prominent newspapers were selected. The test was administrated to a randomly selected sample consisting of (40 female, 20 male) third and fourth year undergraduate students in the Department of English Language and Literature in the Faculty of Educational Sciences and Arts at UNRWA University in Amman, Jordan. Results from the first analysis of the translated Arabic news headlines indicated that the EFL students had grammatical and lexical errors respectively. The second analysis of the translated Arabic news headlines showed that the EFL students had inadequate knowledge of the English headlines rules. The analysis of the translated English headlines revealed that the EFL students’ main difficulties were grammatical followed by discoursal and lexical types. In light of these results, the researcher proposes a number of pedagogical recommendations related to translating news headlines and future research.