Abstract
A study on error in English language use has long been
conducted by different researchers and in different settings
(Richards 1971; Nemser 1971; Selinker 1972; Brown 1994; Ellis
1995). Different English educational institutions continuously
conduct similar studies mainly because they do not only want to
identify linguistic problems encountered by their students and to
account for their language development but they also want to
benefit from the necessary information they may use to better the
learning materials (Farooq 1998; Bartlett 2002). In this study the
writer investigated grammatical errors as encountered in students’
spoken English. Thirty English students of the Faculty of Language
and Cultural Studies Stikubank University were randomly asked to
speak about any issue they were interested in. This was recorded
and the data were transcribed and categorized under (1) the type of
grammatical errors, (2) problem areas, (3) Selinker’s error
categories (1972) and (4) semantic impacts. The most problems
encountered by the students are as follows: verb phrase (24.6%),
syntax (78.7%), transfer of training and strategy of language
learning (77.1%) and local semantic impact (92.6%).