INVESTIGATING LEARNERS’ LEXICAL ERRORS IN WRITING SKILL

Abstract

The present research aims at analyzing English foreign language students’ written productions for the purpose of understanding the sources of the most frequent lexical errors. Writing in a foreign language is one of the most challenging and complex tasks for language learners. It is a difficult skill that requires considerable effort and practice on the learners’ part to reach an acceptable level of writing. Thus, we opted for the quantitative descriptive method to explore lexical errors committed in a composition task written by second year students. Firstly, two questionnaires were administered to both teachers and students to find out the main reasons that underlie lexical errors. Data driven from the questionnaires revealed that EFL students commit lexical errors because of (1) lack of vocabulary knowledge, (2) translation from Arabic to English, (3) lack of grammatical rules, (4) lack of practice, and (5) insufficient teacher corrective feedback. Then, to confirm that students had limited knowledge of English lexis and they made lexical errors, we relied on a written test. The results drawn from the data reveals that misformation and confusion of sense relations errors are the most recurrent ones. Thus, the findings obtained from this study confirmed successfully the research hypothesis. On the basis of these results, some recommendations and suggestions are proposed to improve students’ levels of writing.