Syntactic Errors in EFL learners’ Spoken Production: A case study of Third Year LMD Students at Abdelhafid Boussouf University Center Mila

Abstract

The aim of the current study is to identify, classify and analyze the syntactic errors in the spoken production of students of English at Abd Elhafid Boussouf university center of Mila. The data is collected from 77 students by means of observation based on their performance at courses of oral expression, linguistics and literature. The errors were identified and classified into grammatical categories.. These categories were not based on any pre- defined classification, rather the categories become clear after determining the nature of the errors. Then, the categories of these errors were analyzed and their possible sources were determined with the help of contrastive and error analysis. The findings show that the most frequent errors occur in subject verb agreement, the use of articles, tenses and noun agreement. Furthermore, the contrastive and error analysis of these most frequently occurring errors are due to interlingual transfer, intralingual transfer, the learning strategies employed by learners and lack of knowledge.