"I want to stay in Sweden whole my life..." A study and alalysis of errors in the written production of Swedish pupils in the 9th grade

Abstract

This essay investigates errors in written production by Swedish pupils in the ninth grade. A total of 36 essays were randomly selected from the National Assessment Programme in English in 2010. When analysing the corpus, all errors from six different categories were marked and counted. The categories are word order, plural of nouns, nouns / articles, adjectives / adverbs, verbs / concord errors and prepositions. The aims of the study are to examine the frequency of the errors in the chosen categories and, if possible, explain how some common errors can be understood and explained in terms of so-called negative transfer. Much research has been carried out on second language acquisition and both Contrastive Analysis (CA) and Error Analysis (EA) have been useful as tools in that research. As hypothesised, most errors were found where L1 and L2 differ, (negative) transfer. A certain influence of the mother tongue was apparent in the pupils' L2 acquisition. According to the goals set in the curriculum for the subject of English, a development of communicative skills is important. The result of this study may give an idea of what grammar should be in focus when helping the pupils. As discussed in the essay, explicit grammar teaching and competent teachers will help the pupils to improve their language skills.