Aspects of Written English Language Errors Made by Level-One Students in a South African University

Abstract

Several researchers have raised concerns regarding the perpetual decline of the standard of English proficiency of South African university students in their written production. To be able to cope with university studies and everyday communication in English, a student must have the required proficiency in English language usage for tertiary education. Majority of them, however, still produce erroneous English utterances in their oral and written performances. As a result, this study was intended to investigate the errors in a corpus of essays written by level-one students at a South African university. To achieve the objectives of the study, fifty (50) essays written by level-one students who had registered for English Communication Skills (ECS1541) in the 2021 academic year were analysed. Cluster sampling was used to select the research participants. The study adopted document analysis technique in which data were collected by means of an essay task on a given topic. The study adopted a combination of the Linguistic category and the Surface structure taxonomies to allow a more comprehensive examination and description of errors from different analytical perspectives. The findings revealed that the students committed a total of 445 errors in their written productions. They were errors of omission (41.35%), addition (26.29%) and misformation (32.36%).These errors were further broken down to the following language aspects: copula ‘be’ and other auxiliaries 92 (21%), third person singular 81 (18%), pronoun 79 (18%), preposition 62 (14%), plural marker ‘-s/-es’ 59 (13%), article 32 (7.2%), coordinating conjunction ‘and’ 16 (3.6%), apostrophe ‘s and possessive ’s 14 (3.1%) and past tense markers 10 (2.2%). The possible causes of errors committed were ascribed to a variety of factors including cross- linguistic differences between English and the students’ L1, overgeneralisation, carelessness on the part of the student, insufficient mastery of the English language system and hypercorrection resulting from the students’ strict observance and over-caution regarding the English language structure. Based on the study findings, the study recommends strategies that may offer invaluable insights to English language teachers, module facilitators and curriculum designers operating in similar contexts.