ERROR ANALYSIS AND ENGLISH‐LANGUAGE STRATEGIES OF ARAB STUDENTS¹

Abstract

This study examined the English proficiency of 22 Arabic‐speaking students enrolled in a low intermediate intensive English course at the American University of Beirut. Written and oral samples were taken at the beginning and end of the term. Errors were analysed in terms of performance mistakes, mother‐tongue interference or false intralanguage analogy. The data provided a rank ordering of the subjects' areas of difficulty and enabled us to describe tentatively some aspects of their transitional grammar. The results should provide useful information to teachers of Arabic speakers studying English and to researchers investigating the phenomenon of second‐language acquisition in general.

An Analysis of Article Errors among Saudi Female EFL Students: A Case Study

“…This is in line with Tucker (1977). It is very clear from Table 2 that the majority of the errors regarding the omission of the indefinite articles 'a' or 'an' (50 errors out of 75 errors regarding the omission of the definite article 'a', and 5 out of 6 relating to the omission of 'an') are caused by the L1 interference.…”

Speech fluency in phrases: teaching English oral fluency in distance learning

“…However, one of the most noticeable problems to this approach is determining what constitutes an 'error'. Various scholars define the errorfree T-unit as perfect in all respects (Larsen-Freeman & Strom, 1977), that is, free from morphological and syntactic errors (Scott & Tucker, 1974), or from morphosyntactic and lexical errors (Vann, 1978). While originally viewed as a measure of syntactic complexity, Polio (1997) explained that the error-free T-unit is more appropriately a measure of accuracy.…”

Interlanguage Theory and Emergentism: Reconciliation in Second Language Developmental Index Studies

“…T-unit was first adapted in the form of error-free T-unit by Scott and Tucker (1974) in their error analysis of 22 Arabic-speaking ESL students, when they pursued an index of measurement which reflected error frequency as well as syntactic complexity. They counted the number of error-free T-units in both written and oral production and found a significant growth during the 12 weeks of intensive English training.…”