Types of Turkish ELF student errors in writing exams and their variation across the proficiency levels

In foreign language teaching, communication in oral or written language has two distinctive functions. They both serve as a medium for learning the target language and become the goal of learning that particular language. Language errors produced by learners naturally accompany the process of acquiring these two productive skills. As a field of research in applied linguistics, many studies have been done on learner errors and research has concentrated on what approach and understanding toward errors can foster effective language learning. It seems that a great part of this research has been on learner talk and utterances in and outside the classroom. However, linguistic and psychological aspects of writing errors made during the interlanguage period are equally important. Therefore, in this study an investigation was carried out to identify the error types in writing sections of the exams. It was continued with an observation on the distribution of errors to see if there was a rising or falling trend across the proficiency levels and to see if there were any implications about teaching writing. Finally, an attempt was made to find out what possible psycholinguistic sources could be traced back into the errors examined For this study, out of the total 141 students that fully attended the one-year English classes at Afyon Kocatepe University, fifty-five students were selected by random sampling. Their composition sheets created in three successive formal exams were investigated for morphological, syntactic and lexico-semantic errors. After the elicitation and categorization procedures, results were transferred into tables according to their distribution across learner levels and exam types. Findings derived from the comparison of the tables demonstrated that errors were mainly concentrated in intra verb phrase errors at the syntactic level. At the intermediate level, it was observed that next error concentration occurred in lexico- semantic category. These results at the final stage were in agreement with the conclusions of previous studies in that learners tended to commit errors either because of incomplete rule learning or of giving the priority to semantic simplification and giving less attention to syntactic accuracy.