An Error Analysis of Noun Phrases in Essay Writing Case Study: Third Year LMD Students of English at the University of Mohamed Saddik Ben Yahia - Jijel

Abstract

Noun phrases are one of the keystones of academic writing. Research studies have widely identified the need for analyzing noun phrase errors in improving the students’ quality of writing. The present study sought to identify, describe and analyze noun phrase errors in essay writing made by third year EFL students at the University of Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia, Jijel. To fulfill this aim, an error analysis procedure, described by Corder, was conducted on a randomly chosen sample of 20 essays written in the content module exam “Linguistics”. To analyze the data, the researchers adopted the descriptive approach, combining qualitative procedures of data gathering and data analysis. The results obtained showed that omission errors (64,5%) were the most common type of error made by students followed by misformation (21%), addition (12,9%) and misorder (1,6%) respectively