Use of english relative clauses by L.M.D students: a study of errors
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Date
2017
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Volume Title
Publisher
university of Oum- El- Bouaghi
Abstract
The study aims at investigating students' errors in using relative clauses. The corpus contains 30 paragraph which were analyzed on the basis of error analysis. The types of errors and their causes are provided by Dually (1982) and Richards (1971). The work on the corpus was carried out following three steps. First, detecting the use of relative clauses. Second, identifying the correct ones from the wrong ones focusing on the types of errors (addition, replacement and omission). Third, calculating these errors and classifying them in well-constructed tables. The process of analyzing data revels that the majority of students used the relative clauses with structural or vocabulary mistakes. The percentage of replacement errors 77%. On the contrary, the addition errors were about 16%and the omission errors 7%. The analysis illustrates that the students have problems in matching the subject with the correct pronoun needed in a relative clause. That is to say the major source of error concerning our study is the false rule hypothesis.
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Keywords
Investigating, Relative clauses