Error analysis in writings of English language teaching prep students: A study on bilinguals of Kurdish and Turkish majoring in English

This study aims to find answers on what type of errors do bilingual students (speaking Kurdish and Turkish, and learning English as a target language) make in their writings, what are the sources of these errors, and how these errors can be classified and what potential reasons lie behind these errors. 16 Turkish-Kurdish speaking learners of English selected from preparatory class, English Department, Hakkari University in the academic year 2013-2014. They come from different parts of Turkey where they acquired Kurdish as mother tongue and Turkish in academic life as second language. Besides the written task, a questionnaire will be given to assess the level of source language one and source language two. It also questions the skills' levels in detail and assess the attitude to source languages in learning process. Data collection procedure of this study took approximately 5 months. The first drafts of paragraphs and essays were chosen to analyze. Corder's algorithm was used here to identify errors. SPSS was used to analyze the questionnaire. Thus this study has highlighted the situation in bilinguals. It has shown that even though Kurdish is the mother tongue of all students, Turkish, which is their second language, has more effect on their errors, and learning process. It has been foreseen before the study that SL1 would possibly have more effect on errors and learning process. However, at the end of the study it is understood that SL2 has a higher effect on errors and learning process.