An Investigation of Written Errors Made by Saudi Efl Foundation Year Students

This thesis provides an examination of written errors made by Saudi EFL Foundation Year students at multiple linguistic levels, considering task-related variation in L2 performance. It investigates orthographic, lexical and grammatical errors made in the students’ written compositions and traces the sources of the errors. To gain insight into the students’ explicit knowledge about the items involving key problems, the study examines whether directing the students’ focus to form results in better performance in terms of accuracy with respect to the problematic items involving the highest frequency errors, compared to their performance in the written compositions. The study adopts an error analysis approach. For data collection, it firstly utilizes a written composition task, and then uses a form-focused task in the form of a discrete-point test designed based on the analysis of the errors made in the written compositions. A total of 70 Saudi EFL Foundation Year female students participated in the study. The study adopts both quantitative and qualitative analysis.The findings reveal that the orthographic errors involved vowels, consonants and silent letters. Vowel errors were the highest frequency errors and made with the highest error rate. The majority of orthographic errors were substitution errors. The lexical errors fall into four broad categories with further subcategories. Literal translation, semantic confusion and confusion of part of speech were the highest frequency lexical error categories. The grammatical errors involved nine categories. The copula ‘be’, pronouns, prepositions and articles were the highest in frequency. Errors involving the copula ‘be’ and the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ were made with the highest error rates. The majority of grammatical errors were omission errors.Both L1 interference and the non-phonetic nature of English orthography were found to have a great influence on the occurrence of the orthographic errors. At the lexical and grammatical levels, the findings suggest that L1 interference played a major role in the occurrence of the errors, despite some cases of intralingual errors. The study shows that while the students performed better on the form-focused task with respect to orthography, compared to their performance in the written compositions, they did not achieve better performance in terms of both lexis and grammar. Based on the findings of the study, a number of pedagogical implications are provided