An Analytical Study Of English Grammatical Errors Made By Efl Learners. Case Of Third Year Secondary School Pupils When Forming Wh-questions

Résumé: This study analyzes in brief the findings of a study conducted with third year secondary school pupils, foreign languages stream. It aims at investigating the types of wh-question formation errors and the real causes behind their occurrence using error analysis method. One of the most important interests of this research was to determine whether the L1 interference was the major cause of making such grammatical errors or the intralingual factors caused by the target language. At the end, we attempted to suggest some practical solutions to avoid or at least reduce such errors. This work is composed of two parts, the theoretical background of the study which is about error analysis method and the practical part of the study that includes both the results and analysis of the study. A mixed method which is a combination of quantitative and qualitative research approaches was used with a sample of 20 participants from a secondary school in Algeria. A grammar test was used as a research tool. The final results reveal that the most frequent grammatical errors that learners commit when forming wh- questions were the misuse of wh-words, auxiliary omission, the absence of auxiliary/verb inversion, wrong verb form, verb omission and the unnecessary insertion of the auxiliary to be, but the most frequent ones are the misuse of wh-words and the auxiliary omission. Another significant finding is that most of such errors were not due to L1 interference but to intralingual factors.

Publié dans la revue: مجلة أنسنة للبحوث و الدراسات