Machine summary:
"In this respect, the present study (a) attempted to identify and analyze Iranian learners’ errors in one of the virtual environment of the social networking websites, and (b) the researchers compared Iranian writing performances in the virtual and traditional paper and pencil environments.
After collecting the data of the first phase of the study, the researchers studied them for grammatical and diction errors that the participants had made in their writing performances, and seven most frequent errors namely; verb forms, dictions, prepositions, articles, plural‘s’, quantifiers, and relative pronouns were identified.
One of the objectives of the present study was to figure out whether there were significant differences between the Iranian writing performances in the virtual environment of social networking websites and traditional paper and pencil environment; therefore T-test, Mann-Whitney, and Chi- square tests were needed.
22 Internet Paper & Verb forms 514 475 Prepositions 258 391 Articles 159 139 Plural ‘s’ 102 166 Quantifiers 79 87 Relative pronouns 43 49 Then the erroneous forms were identified from the correct ones, and the total frequencies of errors committed by the participants in all the phases related to the seven types were counted (Table 3).
Relative Frequency of Participants’ Errors in Percentage Interne Paper & pencil Error type Iranian Iranian Verb forms 17 22 Prepositions 24 27 Articles 32 70 Plural ‘s’ 36 70 Quantifiers 25 39 Relative pronouns 34 29 The primary aim of this study was to discover the most frequent Iranian errors in the virtual environment of social networking websites."