Analyzing students Inter-language in Grammar: a case study of Yemeni 1st and 4th levels of University Students, English Departments , Colleges of Education

Abstract

Learning English becomes more and more important nowadays since we know English is one of the international languages, which can be used to communicate around the world. In Yemen, English is learned / taught as a foreign language. Learning a language is sometimes difficult since the target language (English) has different elements compared to the native language (Arabic). These differences sometimes cause students to make errors when speaking or writing it. This study aimed to investigate the students interlanguage in grammar. There will be syntactic errors, relevant to interlingual / intralingual interference committed by Yemeni university students. The purpose of the study was to find out the types of errors Yemeni university students commit in their writing and the source of errors that influenced during their writing. The appropriate literatures on error analysis were completely reviewed in the second chapter. Both Contrastive and error analyses were employed to analyse the erroneous sentences and phrases that were extracted from the students compositions. The subjects participating in this study were 200 Yemeni students. To conduct this study, 200 compositions written by the students of English were used for the analysis. All the errors were identified, classified and explained in terms of their types, and in terms of the source of interference i.e. interlingual and intralingual. The grammatical errors were classified into newlineii newlineeight types such as addition of unnecessary elements , omission of necessary elements , fragmentation sentences, selection of appropriate word, structure of sentence, simplification in using the verb form , word order and subject-verb agreement. Under the addition of unnecessary elements and omission of necessary elements, the errors were mostly in the use of articles, in the use of modal verb, in the use of linking verbs. From the result of the chapter four, it can be concluded that the Yemeni university students made 831 grammatical errors.