Exploring EFL Students Writing Skill through Error Analysis: a Case Study

Abstract

Abstract: The current study aims to identify and investigate writing grammatical errors in the written exams, which are written by students of English at the University of M’hamed Bougara, Boumerdes. The researchers used a mixed-methods approach. This approach is both descriptive/qualitative and quantitative in nature. The data were collected from 84 student exam papers from the writing exam administered in January 2023 at the department of English at M'hamed Bougara University of Boumerdes. The data sources are the exam papers of the writing exam for both groups, and every group contains 42. The results of the study revealed that students employed 387 errors, which can be divided into eight types, which are: spelling, word usage, subject-verb agreement, articles, tense, passive and active voice, prepositions, and conjunctions. According to the findings, spelling errors were the most frequently occurring type of mistake in the learners’ corpus of both groups and they constituted 43.41%. Furthermore, the findings also demonstrated that although both groups shared high frequencies of spelling errors, word usage and article errors were more prevalent amongst second-year students, while third-year students made more subject-verb agreement errors. These findings might be due to the amount of time spent in learning a foreign language. Keywords: Errors, error analysis, writing, and foreign language