Analysis of English language errors in the writing of second year students in a Ghanaian university

Abstract

The writing of undergraduate students in universities across Ghana has been described as pitiable by many researchers. To be able to communicate effectively and succeed in an academic discourse community, a student requires sufficient competence in the use of the English language, which is the medium of instruction in universities across Ghana. However, it is observable that most of the students’ writing in the English language tends to be fraught with some recurrent errors. Data collected were in the form of written compositions. A mixed-method comprising both qualitative and quantitative procedures was used. The qualitative aspect looked at error taxonomies and the quantitative aspect employed statistics to obtain error frequencies. The errors in the writing of Second Year students of a Ghanaian university were analysed using Error Analysis procedures. The findings revealed that students demonstrated poor writing skills with inherent grammatical errors and a lack of cohesion and coherence. A total of 16 error categories were detected with 25% (expression, omission, spelling, capitalisation) of the total errors ranking very high in terms of frequency of occurrence. This was followed by plurality, addition, choice of words and concord making up another 25% of the total errors detected. Errors such as tense, punctuation, preposition, pronoun, faulty parallelism, fragment, wrong transition and article although ranked low, made up a total of 50%. Based on the findings, the study suggested a revision of the academic syllabus and the methods of learning and teaching English language, especially at the tertiary level to enable students to demonstrate competence concerning English language compositions.