Error analysis in the written english vocabulary of form five students in Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Nambayan, Tambunan, Sabah

Abstract

Vocabulary knowledge is crucial in all aspects of English. Students need knowledge of vocabulary to understand text and speech, to produce comprehensible writing and to speak with confidence. The objective of this study is to investigate vocabulary errors committed by a group of Form Five students at Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Nambayan, Tambunan, Sabah by analyzing the vocabulary produced in their essays, in particular their choice of words. Fifty essays were read and then an analysis of the lexical errors was conducted for each error category classified. The learners’ lexical errors have been explained by means of error analysis. The study found that the students’ written output contained diverse types of lexical deviants such as collocational mismatch, semantic overlapping, lexical omissions, lexical additions, errors due to phonetic and orthographic similarities, circumlocution and others. Generally, it has been found that the students experienced much difficulty due to the confusion of sense relation, especially confusion on the grounds of similarity of meaning or semantic overlapping. This has underlined the importance of undertaking an error analysis approach which proposes an inventory of areas of lexical difficulty faced by learners. The value of this inventory is to direct teachers’ attention to these areas, so that they might devote special attention to them and emphasize them in their teaching to overcome or avoid lexical difficulties.