چکیده:
Speaking English fluently and accurately is the most important, favorite, and complicated skill for EFL learners. The present study was an attempt to investigate the morphological speaking errors of Iranian EFL learners across proficiency levels and gender. To this end, a corpus of 1399 tokens of speech morphology errors was collected. The learners' oral production was observed and recorded naturally using various communicative tasks in class. The errors were then detected, transcribed, coded and classified following James (1998) taxonomy of errors. The results represented misselection as the most frequent type at morphology level. The results further showed significant difference between genders in terms of making grammar errors. The findings of this study can provide feedback for English teachers supervisors, and syllabus designers to help EFL learners develop their intrelanguage knowledge of grammar through revisiting teaching methods and implementing remedial materials.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The present study was an attempt to investigate the morphological speaking errors of Iranian EFL learners across proficiency levels and gender.
There have been quite a good number of studies investigating written errors in various English learning settings worldwide among which one can refer to Korean-speaking ELT students’ syntactic errors in their written work by Lee (1997), analysis of errors in paragraph writing in English by first year medical students from the four medical schools at Mahidol university(Sattayatham & Ratanapinyowong,2008), and an analysis of errors in English writing of Sinhala speaking undergraduates (Abeywickrama, 2010).
Studying speech errors has not gained preference due to the enormity of data elicitation, detection, collection, and analysis of speech production although such spoken errors can be indicative of underlying mental processes L2 learners go though in the process of language acquisition.
Based on James (1998), "errors are divided into five principal categories in which learners modify target forms, in other words, five ways in which IL and TL diverge in specific and systematic ways" These 5 categories include (1) omission, (2) addition, (3) misselection (misformation), (4) misordering, and (5) blends.
Adjective inflectional morphemes: (a) Comparative marker –er [fast-faster] and (b) superlative marker –est [fast-fastest] Derivational morphemes are the second group of morphemes affected by morphology errors including affixes (both prefixes and suffixes) whose function is to create new words from base form such as (teach- teacher, modern – modernize, friend- friendly- read –readable, act- active, happy-unhappy).
Given the above, this study aimed at finding different types and tokens of morphological errors in the speech of Persian learners of English across four levels of proficiency and genders.