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Article
Affiliation(s)

College of Languages Education, University of Education, Winneba, Ghana

ABSTRACT

This is a qualitative study aimed at finding the lexical and grammatical errors students of three Senior High Schools in the Central Region of Ghana commit in their essay writing. The study also sought to examine the frequency of the errors and what can be done to improve the teaching of L2 (English) writing in the Senior High School. The study used a corpus of essay writings of 150 second year students. The schools and the participants were purposively selected. The data were analyzed using the content analysis approach. The study identified that the lexical errors in the students’ writing were due to homophone problems and semantic lexical errors. The grammatical errors identified were agreement errors, tense errors, singular-plural (number) errors, prepositional errors, and article errors. The study also found that the most frequently committed grammatical error was tense errors followed by agreement errors. The implications of these findings to the teaching of English writing are that teachers where possible should have understanding of both the L1 and L2 of the students and teachers should explicitly teach for transfer, have adequate knowledge of how to identify students’ writing errors, and use effective teaching strategies to improve students’ English writing. Additionally, teachers should serve as models of using appropriate English for students to emulate and also create a conducive classroom environment for students to participate in class activities. Lastly, teachers should create more opportunities for students to write.

KEYWORDS

grammatical error, lexical error, error analysis, Senior High School (SHS), Ghana

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