AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF THE LEARNERS' WRITING SKILLS: A CASE STUDY OF LAW STUDENTS AT UNIVERSITY OF LAHORE

Abstract

The present research aims to investigate the occurrence of syntactic errors in law under-graduate students’ final written tests with an assumption to find out the sources of these errors by considering the theory of errors analysis by Gass and Selinker (2008). The significance of the study lies in the fact that there is a need to find out the sources which are the main causes of students' writing' deterioration. Errors are natural outcome of learning which are based on various sources. To find out the errors, the data were collected from the law under-graduate students' final written tests of law department of university of Lahore. The collected data were analyzed in two steps. First, the errors were identified and second, they were analyzed accordingly. Two fundamental questions were posed: (a) what kind of syntactic errors are committed by law students? and (b) what are the sources of these errors? The study is quantitative in nature and SPSS version 20 was applied for the graphical representation of errors frequency. The findings of the study showed that there is an extraordinary
frequency of syntactic errors in the final written tests of law students. It also proclaimed that there are different sources of errors like omission, deletion, overgeneralization, interference of first language etc. The findings of study suggest some concrete steps for the further researches in finding the errors.