Investigating Teachers' Views on writing Errors Made by Saudi University Students

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the most frequent errors made by Saudi university students in writing. The study adopted the descriptive-analytic research method. The data of the study was collected from a questionnaire distributed to a sample of 100 English language teachers at Jazan University, King Saud University, and King Khalid University. The above-mentioned tool satisfied the criteria of validity and reliability. The findings revealed the low abilities of the students in understanding and using syntactical rules properly which was reflected in the enormous number of grammatical errors made by the respondents in the test. Wrong tense errors, prepositions, articles errors were found to be the most frequent ones. The findings also revealed that negative transfer from the mother tongue language is one of the major causes of most of the syntactical errors made by the students in the written text. In light of the study findings, several recommendations were suggested by the researcher that could lead to reducing errors made by students in writing and improve students’ writing abilities.