AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF ARABIC WRITING BY ISLAMIC VOCATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Abstract

This research examined different types of writing errors performed by Islamic Vocational High School students undertaking the Arabic course. The current study also discussed the plausible causes of errors committed by the students. A mixed-method approach was used to investigate and analyze a corpus of students’ writing. The data were collected through documentation and obtained from the essays of tenth and eleventh-grade students with 40 respondents. The study employed error analysis steps by Corder as a framework to deal with deviated grammatical rules, including collecting, identifying, classifying, quantifying data, and analyzing sources of errors. The results showed that the most dominant error was spelling, with 35.44%, followed by 28.16% errors in phrases, 22.81% in sentence structures, and 13.59% in agreement. Several possible causes of such errors include overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions, incomplete application of rules, and false concepts hypothesized.