The impact of grammatical competence on 1st year university English students’ written performance

Abstract

It is clear that EFL Iraqi students of English have problems in mastering some grammatical components in English. However, the first year students are struggling with these types of grammar problems, some grammatical rules are similar in the two languages, which makes it rather easy for Arabic speakers to learn English. This study aims to investigate the scope and nature of the syntactic errors made by first year learners of English at Al- Hamdaniya University, Iraq. It identifies, describes, and analyzes errors made in certain specific grammar areas such as tenses, modals, auxiliaries, subject verb agreement, verb forms. The study used a composition writing test of 23 EFL Iraqi first year students. The study focuses on the accuracy in the English writing skills of Iraqi students with the aim to examine the interference of the rules of the target language. For this purpose, researchers in this paper analyse 20 written essays and identified common grammatical errors made by the students.