Abstract:

The aim of the current study is to investigate Turkish EFL learners’ linguistic and lexical errors and their causes. The participants were 30 second year English Language and Literature level students at Karabuk University, Turkey. The students were asked to write an essay about “The Qualities of a Good Language Teacher” as an ordinary English language exercise in the class. As a next step, the essays were collected and analyzed based on the taxonomy of Wakkad (1980) and Tan (2007). Error analysis indicated that the five most common errors were articles, word choice, prepositions, word order and subject-verb agreement. The major causes of these errors were attributable to limited vocabulary, poor grammar knowledge and interference from first language. The analysis also revealed the most common cause of the errors as being L1 interference. 

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