Arab World English Journal, August 2015 Bejaia University, International Conference Proceedings – 2015 Pp. 112 –126
A Morphosyntactic Study of EFL Students’ Written Compositions: A Corpus Based Analysis
Sofiane Mammeri
Department of English University of Bejaia, Algeria
Abstract:
The present paper attempts to explore the written compositions of EFL students at the level of morphosyntax. The purpose of the study is to identify, classify, and supply a plausible interpretation for the different morphosyntactic errors made by the learners. For this reason, a corpus of 120 English written compositions was collected from second year LMD students enrolled in the English department of Bejaia University, Algeria. After analyzing the corpus at the sentence boundary, the findings revealed the following morphosyntactic errors: (1) word order, (2) subject-verb agreement, (3) verb structure, (4) noun/adjective/adverb structure, (5) word/morpheme addition, (6) word/morpheme omission, (7) short forms/abbreviations, and (8) conversational informal words. It concludes with some pedagogical implications to overcome the aforementioned problem and for a better writing performance.
Key words: ELF, Writing, Morphosyntax, Errors Analysis, Algeria