An Error analysis of the Grammatical Errors of Egyptian EFL Learners and a Suggested Program for Enhancing their Grammatical Competence

The present study sought to highlight and categorize EFL Egyptian learners’ grammatical errors for identifying the linguistic deficits that are interfering with their ability to produce well-structured grammatical sentences. The study also aimed at proposing an integrative instructional program for overcoming grammatical errors. The methodology adopted for data analysis was surface strategy taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982). They classified grammatical errors as those of addition, omission, misformation, and misordering. The study comprised two hundred freshmen college students learning English as a foreign language. Each student was asked to write three essays on three different topics about 250 words. The findings revealed that errors pertaining to verb formation and tenses were the most frequent grammatical errors and the majority of them fell in the two categories of substitution and omission. A key finding reached by this study was that interlingual and intralingual transfer seemed to have a great impact on EFL students’ learning of grammar. The study proposed an instructional program that is based on a discourse-based grammar model incorporating input-based and output-based pedagogical techniques. The purpose of the proposed program is to naturally expose learners to the target language and provide them with several opportunities for using it in real life situations. The study points to the importance of teaching grammar for performing communicative purposes to enhance learners’ native-like competence.

keywords : Error analysis- discourse-based grammar- grammatical errors- interlingual transfer- intralingual transfer