Analysis of Written English: The Case of Female University Students in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This research sheds some light on the difficulties faced by Saudi students when writing in the English language by examining specific writing errors committed by the students. Fifty female students in their fourth year of study at the University of Tabuk in the department of languages and translation who were enrolled in the subject of error analysis (a kind of linguistic analysis that emphasizes the errors learners make in a target language) were given a quiz to write approximately one page about each one of three topics: effects of social media on Saudi social life, Saudi marriage customs, and Saudi economy. The quiz was graded and the writing errors were classified into four main categories: grammatical, syntactic, substance, and lexical types following Hubbard et al. (1996) classifications of errors. Then, the number of errors in each category was counted and the corresponding frequency was calculated. The findings of this study show that most frequent types of errors made by the students were in the categories of grammar (tenses, singular/plural, articles), syntax (subject-verb agreement), and substance (spelling).

Arab EFL Learners’ Writing Errors: A Contrastive Error Analysis Study

“…Most of the students' errors (33.28%) occurred largely in word formation. This encompassed demonstratives, verb tense (Ababneh, 2017), plural and singular nouns, adjectives, possessive cases (Qasim, 2013), and articles. In addition, the percentage of students' syntactical errors was 29.13% which was largely in the form of the wrong usage of word order (Al-Mekhlafi, 2013).…”

“…An Arabic sentence sometimes starts with a verb so it might confuse EFL students as English sentences start with nouns or subjects. The most recurrent L2 writing errors which are committed by Arab learners may occur due to the wrong usage of verbs and subjects which highlights their mother tongue 'Arabic' interference (Ababneh, 2017). According to Hadi (2016), Arab learners are very much affected by L1 so they often use the particle 'not' to start English sentences as it is identically formed in Arabic.…”

A Systematic Review of Research on Teaching English Language Skills for Saudi EFL Students

“…Students have numerous writing difficulties in organization, capitalization, vocabulary, grammar, spelling, prepositions, lexical items, syntax, punctuation marks and suffixes and prefixes (Ababneh, 2017;Alhaisoni, Al-Zuoud & Gaudel, 2015;Althobaiti, 2014;Javid, Farooq & Umer, 2013;Javid & Umer, 2014;Raja & Zahid, 2013;Sawalmeh, 2013;Siddiqui, 2015;Younes & Albalawi, 2015).Through analyzing their writing samples, Saudi students lack sociolinguistics competence, grammatical competence, strategic competence, and discourse competence (Almubark, 2016).Moreover, Saudi undergraduates are very weak in writing skills and usually engaged in sentence-level or at the maximum at paragraph-level academic writing (Al-Khairy, 2013b). Their writing errors refer to the interference of mother tongue, over-generalization, insufficient activities and practice of basic techniques of writing (Ahmed, 2016;Naikoo, Ganai& Tawhari, 2016).…”

Writing Errors Among Arab EFL Learners: A Review of Literature

“…Such errors mainly result from the different writing system of English and Arabic according to Almurshedi (2014). The two most common errors made are wrongful capitalization of letters and wrongful non-capitalization of others in addition to the malformation of letters (Ababneh, 2017). He clarifies that former occurs as a result if the absence of the concept of capitalization in the Arabic language.…”