Error Analysis of Inflectional Morphemes Made by Preparatory Year Saudi EFL Students at Al-Jouf University

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the problems that face Saudi preparatory year students at Al-Jouf University as relates to their use of grammatical and inflectional morphemes. The students commit a number of errors in inflectional morphemes when they are involved in writing activities. The focus in this study is to investigate the occurrence of errors in inflectional morphemes, and to find out the types of errors and the most frequent errors that are made by the students. Also, the paper seeks to identify the errors of inflectional morphemes, that affect the students’writing performance to determine which errors have the highest rate of occurrence among the students. The students’ answers in the final examination of the academic year 2013-2014 were used as a tool to collect the data for the purpose of the study. The students were asked to write on two different familiar topics. The study shows that the total number of errors is 53 out of 75 sentences with 50.9%. .The researcher found out that EFL teachers of Preparatory Year at Al-Jouf University are required to deal with the inflectional morphemes more appropriately. Also, teachers should explain to the students all types of inflectional morphemes clearly during the process of teaching. Finally, the standard of teachers must be raised in order to promote their teaching performance.