An Investigation of Students' Syntactic Errors in English Sentence Construction at Government Secondary Schools in Ramallah/ Palestine

Abstract

This is a descriptive and analytical study. It attempts to investigate the syntactic errors in constructing English sentences made by many first secondary grade students at government schools in the Ramallah area with special reference to those errors pertaining to tense, word-order and subject-verb agreement. As well, it is one of the very few studies that have tackled this problem in the West Bank / Palestine. To the researcher’s best knowledge, it might be the first study which handles the problem with respect to students of the secondary stage at government schools rather more widely. For this purpose, a number of hypotheses were proposed. They included the effect of providing information and necessary vocabulary on the number and type of syntactic errors made in constructing English sentences, the effect of sentence level of intricacy on that, the sources of the errors students make in this field and the differences that might exist between the literary stream students and their counterparts in the scientific stream as for the number of errors made in this respect. In order to test the study hypotheses and find answers to the questions raised, the researcher prepared a diagnostic test to be applied to the random and purposive sample which was selected to meet the objectives of the study. Before the application of the test during the second term of the scholastic year 2004/2005, it was e-mailed to a group of experts in English language for evaluation. Moreover, to ensure the test reliability, the researcher first applied it to a pilot sample twice with a week interval between the two sessions. The results pointed to its reliability, and then it was applied to the XIwhole sample in the schools selected. As for marking the students’ answers, it was done by setting them against the model answers prepared for this purpose. After analyzing the data and testing the hypotheses, the researcher arrived at the following conclusions. First, the occurrence of errors was not due to the lack of information and necessary vocabulary, nor was it connected to the level of sentence intricacy. Secondly, the largest number of errors were found to pertain to linguistic and pedagogical reasons rather than to the negative interference of Arabic. Lastly, it was found that students in the literary stream committed a larger number of errors than their counterparts in the scientific stream. All in all, The large number of errors committed pointed to the seriousness of the problem. As well, it was clear that students difficulties in building well-formed sentences were mostly connected to the lack of understanding how the system of sentence construction works in English. This necessitates that some measures be taken to improve the situation, such as enhancing teacher training programs and activating some classroom applications. As well, it is suggested that further research be carried out on other students at various educational levels within the same field.