Grammatical Errors in the Spoken Discourse of ESL Students in a Private Academic Institution

Abstract

This study examined grammatical errors in the spoken discourse of Grade 11 English as a Second Language (ESL) students in a private academic institution. Spoken production requires learners to apply grammatical knowledge under real-time communicative pressure, often revealing difficulties that remain hidden in written tasks. Anchored in Error Analysis Theory and Dulay, Burt, and Krashen's Surface Strategy Taxonomy, the study classified grammatical errors as omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. It also described students' oral performance using Brown and Abeywickrama's Speaking Assessment Rubric, which evaluated grammar, vocabulary, fluency, and pronunciation. Employing a qualitative-descriptive design, the study involved 15 purposively selected Humanities and Social Sciences students who responded to a researcher-developed, expert-validated, and pilot-tested speaking prompt about their daily routines. Their responses were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, coded, classified, and reviewed by three language experts to identify recurring grammatical patterns and speaking-performance indicators. Descriptive frequencies and percentages supported the qualitative interpretation, without extending the findings beyond the sampled data. All speaking components were rated at the developing level, with pronunciation obtaining the highest mean and grammar the lowest, indicating that students could convey basic meaning but had not yet achieved consistent grammatical control. Misformation was the most frequent error type, followed by addition, omission, and misordering, suggesting that learners' primary difficulty involved selecting accurate grammatical forms rather than omitting or misarranging them. Within the daily-routine speaking task, the learners experienced difficulty maintaining grammatical accuracy, particularly in selecting verb forms, agreement patterns, prepositions, articles, and sentence structures in real time. The study provides localized evidence from senior high school spoken discourse and underscores the instructional value of communicative, feedback-rich speaking tasks that develop accuracy and fluency concurrently, offering ESL teachers and curriculum planners a practical basis for designing oral grammar instruction that reflects learners' actual speaking performance.