The Structuring of English Sentences by Chadian EFL Learners

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that there is a positive attitude and an increase motivation in the learning of English language by Chadian learners. Despite this, the learners’ linguistic performances remain poor especially in their written productions which are often characterised by grammatical deviances and incomprehensible sentences. This study investigates several kinds of deviances that occur in the structure of English sentences produced by Chadian learners of English as Foreign Language (EFL). The study was carried out using corpora as the method for data collection. Thus, data were drawn from 175authentic narrative paragraphs written by 175Terminale A4 students from Lycée Adoum Dallah, Moundou in Chad. The analyses were based on Interlanguage and Error Analysis Theories. Findings revealed that miss elective errors were the widespread errors committed by Chadian learners of EFL as this category represents 39.17% of deviances.  The results also indicate that sentences produced by Chadian learners of EFL were frequently affected by additive errors (27.76%) and omissionerrors (26.47%). Lastly, the study equally found that misordering errors were less committed as this category of errors represents a small proportion (6.58%) of deviances. These categories of errors were attributed to French language influences and intralingual factors.