The purpose of this study was to investigate the most common writing errors made by undergraduate Saudi students with special focus on the five most common errors. The study also examined whether the type of prompt has an effect on the frequency of these errors. 58 English major students participated in this study, and each student wrote two timed essays. The first one was persuasive and the second one was compare and contrast. In order to analyze the data, the researcher used an error inventory developed by Bushong and Mihai (2012) based on Ferris (2002), which categorized ten types of errors. However, five other errors were added to this category later, which resulted in a combination of fifteen types of errors. The findings revealed that missing/unnecessary word was the most frequent type of error (17.86%), followed by spelling errors (15.66%), wrong choice (14.00%), article (7.68%), wrong noun form (6.68%). In addition, the results showed that the type of prompt had no effect on the number of errors. However, it had an influence on the frequency and types of errors, which was manifested in the differences between the last two categories of the five most common errors found in prompts A and B.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-5922 |
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
| Creators | Barzanji, Amal |
| Publisher | University of Central Florida |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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