RESEARCH ARTICLE SYNTACTIC ERROR ANALYSIS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE GRAMMAR: A STUDY AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS OF KERALA

language grammar, secondary school students Learners make errors during the process of learning languages. This aspect should not be avoided as unimportant. There is a need to identify the errors and help them to reduce the errors. Syntactic structures are the base of English grammar. This study analyzes syntactic errors in writing task of 200 secondary school students of Kerala. Students were given language acquisition test and the investigators found 10 different areas of errors, categorized in the descending order of number of errors. The Causes of these errors; from the perception of teachers were also analyzed using a questionnaire on a sample of 62 secondary school English teachers. The result through percentage analysis revealed that attitude of students, inter lingual interference and the present method of teaching are the major causes of syntactic errors among secondary school students. Investigators also suggested two prominent teaching strategies, namely sheltered instruction and task based approach to help learners to overcome the errors. Along with the strategies certain helpful suggestions were also pinpointed in the study. Having such an understanding into language errors is useful for teachers, because it provides information on common syntactic errors in the process of communication. Also, it can be used to predict and reduce problems due to errors in learning the English language