Errors in Writing Among Female Students at the Tertiary Level in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Writing is regarded as the most challenging skill to acquire when learning a foreign language. Extensive research into students' writing abilities is one method for understanding the challenges they face when writing. This study aims to investigate the most frequent English writing errors made by Saudi female university students at the tertiary level. The study's population comprised forty female college students. They had 45 minutes to write paragraphs on a variety of subjects. The participants in this study were selected at random and asked to compose an essay on any of the topics provided so that errors could be identified; the results were then analyzed and explained. Based on the findings, we can conclude that all 40 paragraphs of the essays written by Saudi female university students at the tertiary level contained 192 misspellings. There were 41 plural form errors, 58 comma punctuation errors, and 52 full stop punctuation errors. There were 119 instances of incorrect grammar, syntax, or word choice. The data analysis concludes that female students make numerous punctuation, syntactic, grammatical, and lexical errors, with most errors occurring in spelling and syntax. The results of this study are significant because the identified errors will have pedagogical implications when teaching writing skills to college-level English language students. This result sheds light on the areas that should be emphasized when teaching writing skills to EFL students in Saudi Arabia.

Arab EFL Students’ and Instructors’ Perceptions of Errors in Mechanics in Second Language Paragraph Writing

“…Spelling errors may be improved after giving students feedback (Nair & Hui, 2018). Nisa et al (2023) and Alzamil (2020) recommended adding more exercises focused on spelling and punctuation to the course outline.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that EFL learners face many difficulties and constantly make errors in mechanics (Shanorra et al, 2021) due to a lack of understanding of mechanics (Abbas & Herdi, 2018). Arabic-speaking students, in particular, tend to make more mistakes in mechanics than non-Arabic-speaking students (Alhaisoni et al, 2015;Al-Sobhi et al, 2017;Nisa et al, 2023). These errors often manifest in spelling, capitalization, and comma usage.…”