The Most Common Punctuation Mistakes Made By Learners In Written English Essays

Résumé: Punctuation marks are highly significant in the English language since they help to organize your writing, thoughts, and the meaning you need to convey. Unfortunately, they are regarded as one of the most serious issues that students experience during their learning. They are hard to master due to their numerous uses. The aim of this study is to determine the most common punctuation mistakes which English as a foreign language learners make in their writing and to test whether there is a significance difference in making mistakes due to gender. To this end, a corpus-based analysis was carried out. Forty two (42) essays were used as the data collection instrument, authored equally by third-year English language learners: 21 males and 21 females from the Department of English, Larbi Ben M'hidi University. The frequency of the most common mistakes was then assessed using Grammarly. The IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 22 program was employed to conduct the statistical data analysis, and the T-test was also used at the end of the study. The results revealed that students made several mistakes in three punctuation marks (comma, period, and semicolon). The comma was the most frequent. The difficulties they encountered when using them were misusing or missing them. Moreover, the results revealed that there were no significant differences in punctuation mistakes due to gender. As a result of these findings, several recommendations for future educational implications were made, limitations were noted, and suggestions for more investigation were provided.

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