An analysis of written english errors made by grade 11 pupils in a multilingual context: a case of selected schools in Kabwe and monze districts of Zambia
Loading...
Date
2015-05-12
Authors
Moonga, Ireen
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This study examined general errors committed by Grade 11 pupils learning English as a second language in selected schools in Kabwe and Monze Districts of Zambia. The study seeks to establish why learners, despite all the teaching that has been done on common language errors, have continued committing errors.The corpus was obtained by administering written essays with 120 participants in the six selected high schools. The written test was committed by the pupils in English and after marking the pupils' scripts, the researcher in conjunction with the selected teachers of English subjected the errors to categorization according to types. The errors were examined through the linguistic theory of error analysis. The teachers of English language and administrators during the focus group discussions pointed out a variety of possible sources of the pupil errors.Data were analyzed through content analysis and descriptive statistics in line with the emerging themes. Arising from the analysis, the study revealed four main groupings of errors most commonly encountered in the samples of these pupils learning English as their second Language. The four groupings are grammatical, morphological/lexical, semantic and phonological errors. For a closer examination and analysis, these errors were divided into categories of concord, preposition, spelling, punctuation, wrong expressions, wrong word order, wrong time expressions, double grammatical markers, clumsy expressions, words with similar pronunciation and LI interference errors. These error types were presented, discussed and analyzed according to the objectives of the study.The study revealed that the predominant source of errors is interlingua rather than intralingua. Interlingual errors are a result of language transfer, which is caused by the learner's first language as defined by the Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (1992) while intralingual errors result from faulty or partial learning of the target language rather than language transfer. In short, interlingua is concerned with errors that occur due to the structural differences between languages while intralingua has to do with the errors that occur within a language.Through a careful analysis of errors made by the Grade 11 pupils in the selected Zambian schools, the outcome of the study revealed that multilingualism (viewed through the pupils' LI) affects the quality of written English in the schools. In order to generate results that may be generalized to the whole Country, there is need for the same study to be carried out in all the ten provinces of Zambia.
Description
Keywords
English language--Writing--Zambia , Written communication , English--study and teaching--Zambia