A Longitudinal Analysis Study of Writing Errors Made by EFL Students at Al-Quds Open University (QOU) the Case of Language Use Course (Published)
Errors are considered by many educators to be an integral part of the teaching – learning process. The writing errors of English -major students, in particular, are considered to be significant and beneficial since they can be used to identify the pedagogical problems that might be the reasons of these errors, to predict some possible difficulties in student’s writing especially when they need to sit for exams in the literary courses and most importantly to prepare effective teaching materials and activities that take into account students’ needs and problems. This study, therefore, aimed to analyze a corpus of English texts written by students of a course entitled Language Use at Al-Quds Open University in Nablus in three years (2103 -2015). The objective of the study was to identify the possible types of errors, their frequency and possible causes so as to come up with some recommendations and suggestions that can help both instructors and students at QOU to minimize the frequency of these errors and their negative in the future courses especially when sitting for written exams and submitting assignments and reports. To achieve these objectives, frequencies, percentages and means of errors were calculated and tabulated .Results revealed that the most frequent error type was spelling which scored 39.60 % while relativization scored the least frequent type of errors, about 2.179 %.
Keywords: EFL, Error Analysis, Language use, QOU