Writing Syntactical and Punctuation Errors Among First Level Sudanese University Students

Abstract

The study is an attempt to analyze paragraph writing syntactical and punctuation errors that are committed by Sudanese university students, first level who study English a foreign language (FL). The targeted students have finished their academic study at secondary level schools then they joined the university in the year (2016 -2017). The objectives of the study are to investigate and analyze the difficulties and problems in their grammar and certain skills of writing performance. Based on the findings the results show clearly the weaknesses in grammar and students' certain writing skills. The weaknesses in grammar and students' writing performance are attributed mainly to the developmental errors that are associated to the developing sequence of learning English. Also, Intralingua errors and interference of mother tongue (interlinguas) set as extra important causes as well. The study adopts the descriptive methodology. Though students bear considerable problems in paragraph writing performance, they show promotion in acquiring certain writing skills and have shown noticeable developing in their writing performance by the end of the said year.