awej 5 no.4 full issue 2014

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.3, 2014Errors Analysis: A Case Study of Saudi Learner‟s EnglishAlahmadi1. Misuse of singular and plural nounsArab World English JournalISSN: 2229-9327Diagram (A): Frequency of grammaticalerrors by type in Saudi ArabiaThe first most frequent kind of error to be discussed among Saudi students studying in SaudiArabia is the “misuse of singular and plural”. In this particular category, and according to thedata and the number of errors calculated, Saudi students committed the highest number of errorsin this category with an average number of 27.67 as illustrated in diagram (A). One student fromthis group committed the same error almost 50 times during 15 minutes of speech, although theminimum number was almost quite high compared with other types of errors but was less likelyto be the least. It was almost committed at least 13 times by one of the Saudi students in thisgroup. However, the English noun is defined as “a word that is used to name any person, animal,thing, idea, state, or quality (Russell, 1993, p. 16). In addition, according to Scott & Tucker, whoanalysed syntactic errors, singular and plural nouns can be defined as the following: “singularnouns which should have been plurals, singular nouns incorrectly marked as plurals, incorrectlyformed plurals, and non-count nouns used with the plural marker” (1974, p. 22).As a result, student errors will be divided into two main types, in order to identify the source ofthese errors. These types are as follows:1.1 Errors with plural nounsWith this type of error students tend to mark plural nouns with singular forms. Many Saudistudents in this group committed the same type of mistake when facing problems with the pluralform of singular nouns in English. For instance:1- I think this successful than reading book.2- To skip the important thing.From the previous examples, it is obvious that Saudi students experience difficulty when itcomes to changing the singular nouns into the correct plural form in English. First of all, it wouldbe useful to point out that English is “an inflectional language, in which prefixes or suffixes playa significant grammatical role” (Fromkin & Rodman, 1998, as cited in Jing, Tindall & Nisbet,2006, p. 5). These prefixes and suffixes play a major rule in formatting the nouns and verbs, suchas adding an “s” to change the singular form to plural. According to the literature, during thewww.awej.org88