A Comparative Analysis of Written Errors of Turkish, Azerbaijani and Syrian Students in English Writing Skills

Year 2018, Volume: 5 Issue: 2, 64 - 78, 20.12.2018

Mustafa Polat

https://doi.org/10.33200/ijcer.470855

Cited By: 1

Abstract

This study aims to do a comparative analysis of
the writing errors of Turkish, Azerbaijani and Syrian university students
studying in English preparatory classes in the context of grammatical, lexical
and spelling errors. The data of this qualitative case study were obtained from
the 15 English preparatory class students from Turkey (N=5), Syria (N=5) and
Azerbaijan (N=5). They were studying at A2 (pre-intermediate) level classes at
the school of foreign languages of a state university in the northwest of
Turkey. In order to get the information from the writing errors made by the
students, 60 pieces of their writing papers were collected through the document
analysis technique. The research data were analyzed through the content
analysis. The findings revealed that Turkish, Azerbaijani and Syrian students
have some differences in terms of both the number and the types of writing
errors. On the other hand, Turkish and Azerbaijani students have also a lot of
similarities, but they differ from Syrian students in almost all types of
errors. In the light of the findings of this study, it has been concluded that
most of the errors resulted from the mother tongue and culture-related negative
transfers are frequently encountered ones in the teaching process of writing
skills.

Keywords

Foreign language education, Writing skill, Errors in writing skills, Comparative error analysis, Interlingual errors

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