According to her study, 134 punctuationerrors were allocated. The problem that students struggle the most wascapitalization. This was illustrated by the fact that such errors happened 49times.
She concluded her study stating that the misconception in students mineis the reason of the misuse of subject-verb agreement. In her point of view, itis important to teach students the rules of punctuations so they can avoid sucherrors primarily.Hourani (2008) investigatedgrammatical errors committed by Emirati secondary male students when writingessays in English. The number of participants was 115 and they were in theirthird year of secondary education. Students were asked to write an essaybetween 120 to 200 words about a certain topic in 50 minutes. This studycalculated a total of 1175 errors. Based on the results, the most prominenterrors that students committed in their essays were Subject -verb agreementerrors with a percentage of 25%, 22% was the percentage of tense verb and formerrors, while prepositions was 15% and word order was only 11%.
The lessfrequent errors were articles 10%, plurality 8%, passive voice 6% andauxiliaries 3%. According to this study, 38% of the errors were interlingualand 62% were intralingual. It is clear from the findings that ”Emirati malestudents do commit errors because of L1 transfer. However, their biggest numberof errors is due to intralingual reasons”, (p.42).
A study by Nanda, Inyaha and Ghani (2016)examines writing errors committed by students of Senior High School 10 BandaAceh in Indonesia. 5 students’ writings were chosen from each class of grade XIto collect a total of 20 writings to be analysed for this study. After classifyingthe errors, it has been found that students made six categories of errors inwriting. Table 1 in this shows that the highest number of errors committed bythe participants were the grammatical 51, 93%. The second dominant error waspunctuation which covered around 16.
02% of errors. Errors of spelling followedthem with a percentage of 8.90%, word choice 8.61% and capitalization with thepercentage of 8.01%. Organization was the least frequent error with 6.53%.
A study was conducted in theUniversity of El Salvador by Jéménez (2013) and others to analyse and identify the writing skilldifficulties of the English Composition I students. Three techniques were usedto collect data, an interview, a survey and content analysis. After the presentation of the study’sresults, researchers concluded that mapping and editing are considered the mostdifficult techniques that student are least to use, because they do not knowexactly what they are due to the fact that they did not have previousexplanation about them.
In addition, professors of English composition presentsome writing techniques like brain storming, editing, mapping and free writing.Nevertheless, students seem to prefer only three of them which are brainstorming, free writing and making list. (Jéménez et al., 2013)
