A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Yemeni Students’ Writing Compositions

Abstract

This research paper studies the morphosyntactic errors in written texts of 20 Yemeni students enrolled in the fourth year, Department of English, Faculty of Education, Hodieda University. The main objectives are to describe the morphosyntactic errors committed by students while involving in written tasks, classify them and discover their sources. To achieve these objectives, a qualitative descriptive research method is employed. A written task of 250 words is to be written by the students on one of two topics. The findings of this study reveal that the syntactic errors are more than the morphological errors. Furthermore, both the morphological and syntactic errors  are distributed in omission, addition and misformation whereas the disordering errors include syntactic errors only. The misformation errors represent nearly a half of the total errors. Concerning the sources of errors, most errors are intralingual errors which are related to the Target Language (TA).