An Overview of Students’ Errors in Identifying and Analysing Verb Complementation Types
An Overview of Students’ Errors in Identifying and Analysing Verb Complementation Types

Summary/Abstract: Teaching verbal groups in terms of their complementation types can be a fairly difficult process since they often trigger confusion among students. Therefore, teachers need to be aware of the most common errors that their students make in order to find the right strategies that help them understand those aspects better. After providing 60 students in a group with all significant information on verb complementation types, we organised an online progress test held via Google Classroom and Google Meet. The assignment covered 12 simple sentences which had to be analysed syntactically by identifying types of verbal groups and functions of their obligatory and/or optional adjuncts. The students had one hour to complete the task and turn in their papers. Following the correction of the papers, we drew up a list of the most frequent errors and processed the data statistically. The students’ results in the test paper revealed that most of them found it hard to identify intensive, complex transitive, and prepositional verbal groups and, implicitly, to analyse their complements by pointing out the right syntactic functions. We consider that the findings offered us a valuable insight into the aspects that most students find difficult and made us think of improving our teaching strategies so that students can be provided with a clearer approach in order to achieve better results.

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