Descriptive Study of the University of Dar es Salaam EFL Students’ Errors

Abstract

This article is a product of a study that sought to analyse errors committed by a small group of EFL first year students (totalling 34)  in their second semester of study of 2006/07 academic year.  This was achieved by reading through students’ scripts, which were of a range between one paragraph and to three pages of A4 paper size.  The task was on making evaluation of a language skills course that was taking place during the long vacation of the 2008/09 academic year, and they were participants.  The errors that were noted were highlighted and labelled.  They were then isolated into separate spread sheets bearing the five linguistic levels – morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic-pragmatic, an orthographic.  The findings show that there is prevalence of orthographic errors, followed by errors of lexical types, then syntactic errors.  The fewest errors are of semantic – pragmatic category, which is closely preceded by morphological errors.   Generally, only a few errors are of the types which would either render the message non-communicative or render the message non-communicative or render it different from what was intended by the writer.