error analysis of written english essays the case of students.pdfVIP

1 English for Specific Purposes World, ISSN 1682-3257, , Issue 40, vol. 14, 2013 Error Analysis of Written English Essays: The case of Students of the Preparatory Year Program in Saudi Arabia Murad Hassan Mohammed Sawalmeh University of Hail, Saudi Arabia E-mail: msawalmeh@ Murad H. Sawalmeh is a full-time lecturer in the English language Center at University of Ha’il, Saudi Arabia. He obtained his M.A. degree in linguistics from the University of Jordan in 2007. He has over ten years of experience teaching English as a second and foreign language in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. His research interest is in line with sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, error analysis and translation. Murad has recently started his PhD research on genre analysis at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Abstract The present study attempts to investigate the errors in a corpus of 32 essays written by 32Arabic-speaking Saudi learners of English. All the participants in the study are male students who graduated from Saudi secondary schools and joined the Preparatory Year Program at University of Hail. The instrument used for this study was participants’ written essays in English language. All of the errors in these essays were identified and classified into different categorizations. The results show that the Arabic speakers in this study committed ten common errors. These errors are: (1) verb tense, (2) word order, (3) singular/plural form, (4) subject