An Analysis of Errors in Subject-Verb Agreement Among Turkish EFL Learners’ Writing

Abstract

In the context of higher education in Turkey, university students are expected to have a good English grammar in their departments and to be able to write articles, reports and projects in this language. Despite having been taught in primary and secondary schools, there are still grammatical errors in students’ writings viewed in the higher learning institutions. This study aims to investigate the written subject-verb agreement errors made by the students of preparatory classes at a foundation university. In the data collection, a qualitative research method was utilized. The error analysis technique was implemented to find the errors made by the students in terms of inflecting verbs in the simple present tense and to investigate the error types besides the error sources. Twenty preparatory school students participated in this descriptive study. The data were obtained from subject-verb agreement errors in students' sentences and then short interviews were held to investigate the reasons for the errors. The findings showed that students’ subject-verb agreement errors are misformation, omission, and addition and encountered from linguistic categorization perspective, the errors are in the form of improper use of singular/plural nouns placed as the subject, inappropriate use of verbs, and improper use of nominal sentences. The research reveals that when students are taught the present-tense, they experience problems in using the correct patterns of subject-verb agreement, and this problem occurs because of grammatical differences between the mother tongue and the language learned and teachers' improper use of the structures.