INTER AND INTRA SENTENTIAL ERRORS IN THE WRITTEN COMPOSITION OF ARAB EFL LEARNERS
ERREURS INTER ET INTRA PROPOSITIONNELLES DANS LES ORDINATEURS DES ÉTUDIANTS ARABES QUI ÉTUDIENT L’ANGLAIS

Summary/Abstract: Teachers of EFL often claim that reading, writing and grammar are emphasized more than listening and speaking. However, when one looks in detail at high school student’s writing experience in Jordan, we find that it has been mainly at the sentence level. Students enter universities with little or no experience in producing paragraphs or essays. The university task is to take students through the tedious process of paragraph and essay writing (Markline &Issacson 1987, Reid & Lidstorm 1985, Silva 1990, Fawset & Sandberg 1996, etc). Cognitive maturity is, yet, a metalinguistic problem that teachers have to take into consideration in teaching writing (Flavell 1985, Devine &Boshoff 1993, Kasper 1998). This paper aims at investigating some problems at both the micro and the macro levels of texts produced by Arab EFL learners. At the micro level the study will be limited to the problem of lexis and lexical choice. At the macro level the study will high light problems related to run-on sentences, reference relations, tense sequencing and logical organization. This study attempts to shed light on a more serious problem pertaining to discourse and cognitive development posed by the texts produces. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications, suggestions and recommendations for the teaching of writing to EFL learners.

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