An Analysis of Grammatical and Lexical Errors of Grade 12 Students on their Narratives

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Writing, as one of the macro skills in language, is a helpful tool in expressing one’s thoughts and feelings. However, a student’s performance in writing could be considered insufficient and incompetent. Hence, this study is conducted. This paper investigated the most common lexical and grammatical errors of G12 students on their narratives from their Work Immersion. It employed both the qualitative and quantitative method of research.

METHODS

The narratives were gathered from different areas of specialization in Tanza National Trade School. These narratives include those in academic and technical-vocational and livelihood track. Then, the researchers examined errors in a corpus of 50 narrative essays of the students. The participants were purposively selected because they possessed the characteristics needed by the researcher. After identifying the errors, the researchers did the coding of the errors committed by the students to identify the categories where these errors mostly fall. Furthermore, it examined possible causes of these errors and discussed its implications to language learning and teaching.

RESULTS

They classified these errors into categories: tenses of the verb, subject and verb agreement, punctuation marks, spelling, and preposition. These errors were clearly observed from the narratives.

DISCUSSIONS

Among the errors made by Grade 12 students on their narratives, it is very prevalent that most of the students failed to observe the correct use of tenses since these narratives tell the stories of the past experiences. Thus, this study seeks for actions and interventions of language teachers to strengthen the knowledge of the students in English, especially in writing.