Grammatical errors in Saudi students' writing : a minimalist approach / Mohammad Abdul Aziz Omar Al-Khatib
This empirical study is an analysis of EFL writing by third year university students. There are three aims of the current work; (1) to find out the kinds of grammatical errors Saudi students make in their writings; (2) to explicate ungrammaticality of the students' errors employing the Min...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Published: |
2012
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| Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/4017/1/Title_page%2C_abstract%2C_content.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/4017/2/Full_chapters.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/4017/3/References_%26_appendices.pdf http://pendeta.um.edu.my/client/default/search/results?qu=Grammatical+errors+in+Saudi+students%27+writing+%3A+a+minimalist+approach+Al-khatib&te= http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/4017/ |
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| Institution: | Universiti Malaya |
| Summary: | This empirical study is an analysis of EFL writing by third year university students. There
are three aims of the current work; (1) to find out the kinds of grammatical errors Saudi
students make in their writings; (2) to explicate ungrammaticality of the students' errors
employing the Minimalist Program; (3) to evaluate the contributing factors that cause
grammatical errors. Data was derived from compositions written by a stratified random
sample of twenty junior students majoring in English at The Faculty of Arts and
Humanities in King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Actually, these
compositions are an assignment given by their lecturer as a kind of critical writing about
the play Trifles by Glaspell. The study is qualitative in nature as it primarily focuses on
analyzing the types of grammatical errors no matter how frequent they occur. Findings
revealed that most of the grammatical errors are in sentence structure, prepositions, subjectverb agreement and wrong use of words. The results demonstrated that Saudi juniors do not
completely fulfill the requirement for lexical information of an English sentence in the
sense they still do not fully understand how many arguments a verb must have, what
features a verb may have in terms of transitivity, intransitivity or even what kind of phrase
that a verb subcategorizes for. With regard to factors causing ungrammaticality, intralanguage errors were the majority of the grammatical errors in the writings whereas
mother-tongue interference has no great influence on the students' writing. Saudi EFL
students seem to over-generalize English rules to other positions in sentence structure.
Also, they are not aware, sometimes, of the exceptions or restrictions of a rule which results
in ill-formed structure. Findings of the study and its pedagogical implications are discussed
in detail in chapter five. |
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