Résumé:
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.