Morphosyntactic errors in the written english of the form one students of the Lang’ata Boys’ High School

Abstract

The main focus of this study was to examine the common morpho-syntactic errors on the aspect of number agreement in the written English of form one students of the Lang’ata Boys’ high school. A sample of forty students’ written scripts was drawn from all the one hundred and sixty students of form one through purposive sampling from the single written composition. The study covered the following categories for identifying errors; singular verb for plural subject, plural verb for a singular subject and lack of agreement in the noun phrase. The errors were determined through a consideration of the deviations of the students grammar from the norms of the target language (British English). The data was first presented in tables showing the occurrence of each of the predicted errors, then errors per subject, and finally tabulations of frequency percentages. The study results showed that lack of agreement in the NP errors were the most common and those of the plural subject versus singular verb type were the least common. Lastly, based on the available literature on error analysis, the study discussed the possible causes of the errors observed. It emerged that overgeneralization was the main cause of the morpho-syntactic errors found in the written English of these form one students of the Lang’ata Boys’ high school.