Error Analisis
AN ANALYSIS ON ERRORS BY 11th GRADERS IN WRITING ENGLISH COMPOSITIONS
Kamal Raj Dahal
CET Member
0. Abstract Error Analysis (EA in short), in language teaching and testing, is a technique of measuring progress and of devising teaching methods by recording and classifying the mistakes made by the second or foreign language learners. It is a process in which one analyzes the language performance of second language learners, identifies the errors contained in the performance samples, studies and analyses them into different categories and investigates their probable causes or sources.
This paper tries to identify, and describe errors in English committed by 11th graders in writing compositions in English. The data are collected from the 21 students’ free writing on the topic ‘describe your village’ who were studying in class 11 (Nepali medium) most of them were from Nepali medium background. The sampled answer sheets were selected purposively especially the answer sheets with very little writing were excluded.
The paper is divided into the following 3 parts. They are Recognition of Errors (1), Description of Errors (2), and Conclusion (3).
1. Recognition of Errors English learners of Nepali native speakers who were studying in grade 11 were asked to write a description about their village in about 150 words with the time limit 40 minutes as their class test. Then their answers were collected and checked by the paper writer indicating the errors. As the nature of errors is systematic, regular and repetitive, the wrong items with single occurrence and reoccurrence with inconsistency are not counted as the erroneous items. The total errors that were found in 21 answer sheets are shown on the following table with their classification in terms of levels of language.
Table No. 1. Types Errors in Terms of Levels of Language
S.N. Types of Errors Frequency of Errors Percentage
1. Spelling Errors 97 35.0
2. Morphological Errors 65 24.o
3. Syntactic Errors 59
Kamal Raj Dahal
CET Member
0. Abstract Error Analysis (EA in short), in language teaching and testing, is a technique of measuring progress and of devising teaching methods by recording and classifying the mistakes made by the second or foreign language learners. It is a process in which one analyzes the language performance of second language learners, identifies the errors contained in the performance samples, studies and analyses them into different categories and investigates their probable causes or sources.
This paper tries to identify, and describe errors in English committed by 11th graders in writing compositions in English. The data are collected from the 21 students’ free writing on the topic ‘describe your village’ who were studying in class 11 (Nepali medium) most of them were from Nepali medium background. The sampled answer sheets were selected purposively especially the answer sheets with very little writing were excluded.
The paper is divided into the following 3 parts. They are Recognition of Errors (1), Description of Errors (2), and Conclusion (3).
1. Recognition of Errors English learners of Nepali native speakers who were studying in grade 11 were asked to write a description about their village in about 150 words with the time limit 40 minutes as their class test. Then their answers were collected and checked by the paper writer indicating the errors. As the nature of errors is systematic, regular and repetitive, the wrong items with single occurrence and reoccurrence with inconsistency are not counted as the erroneous items. The total errors that were found in 21 answer sheets are shown on the following table with their classification in terms of levels of language.
Table No. 1. Types Errors in Terms of Levels of Language
S.N. Types of Errors Frequency of Errors Percentage
1. Spelling Errors 97 35.0
2. Morphological Errors 65 24.o
3. Syntactic Errors 59