Investigating the Grammatical Errors Made by EFL Learners in Essay Writing

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the grammatical errors made by EFL learners in university English departments in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (henceforth KRI). A mixed-method approach has been employed in doing the research, in that two data collection tools have been used: a researcher-made questionnaire and randomly selected samples of the students’ essays. The first tool was used to know the university instructors’ perspectives concerning the source of the grammatical errors made by EFL learners, and the second one was used to practically investigate their errors.  The quantitative data have been analyzed using SPSS (version26), and document analysis has been used to analyze the essay samples. The participants of the study include seventy-one university instructors from eight state universities and fifty-five third-year English department students from six state universities. The results indicate that the highest frequency of the committed grammatical errors is in the verb form, while the least frequently recorded grammatical errors were in possessive forms. The study is significant for syllabus designers and material developers to pay more attention to the grammatical issues in essay writing courses. One of the remarkable conclusions of the paper is that the most frequently committed errors made by Kurdish EFL learners were in the verb forms.