Grammatical, lexical, and mechanical errors in writing made by 12-14 year old learners as a second foreign language in a French-medium private school in North Lebanon

Abstract

This study focuses on gaining insights into grammatical, lexical, and mechanical errors made by 25 Arabic-speaking students aged between 12-14 in Grade Eight at a French medium private school in Tripoli, Lebanon. This research, with its emphasis on the detailed micro-analysis of learners’ errors, aimed at investigating whether these learners’ errors were due to L1, L2 Transfer or Developmental factors. The study drew on a students’ writing test. The students’ paragraphs were corrected by the researcher herself as well as by a native teacher, where the errors were identified, described, explained and then evaluated in order to find their source and the best form of remediation. Results indicated that interference from the mother tongue was the most potent source of error, especially in prepositions, tenses, articles and sentence structure. With regard to intraligual errors, overgeneralization was the most common cause. The following limitations are acknowledged: the study was conducted on only a small number of students; different types of written material might produce a different distribution of error or a different set of error types; the study offers an incomplete picture of learner language because it examines only what learners do wrongly and ignores what they do correctly; students’ avoidance of certain structures in English does not tell the researcher much about their language performance. The study concludes by offering some pedagogical implications. Error Analysis can help the researcher in achieving two important goals in second language acquisition. Firstly, it provides a description of the interlanguages and what learners have learned and what needs to be learned. Secondly, it offers an insight into the processes and factors involved in acquiring L2. In other words, learner errors serve as devices by which learners can discover the rules of the target language.