Abstract

This study examined errors in the written English of black learners in secondary schools in Phuthaditjhaba. This is a descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study to find out the categories of errors made by Phuthaditjhaba grade 11 learners and the possible causes of such errors. A random stratified sample of three schools, one from the top stratum, one from the middle stratum and one from the bottom stratum, was selected based on the merit list of the overall Provincial Examination Results of the Phuthaditjhaba District for the academic year 1998. Samples of written language were elicited from 108 learners by means of a written composition task. Thirty compositions, ten from each school, were randomly selected for analysis. The thirty compositions were not of equal length; to control for this only the first 200 words of each composition were analyzed for errors. The results revealed that the learners made errors falling into two major categories: grammatical and lexical. Grammatical errors were categorized into verbs, articles, prepositions, singular-plural noun forms and pronouns. Lexical errors were categorized into spelling and semantic errors. An analysis of the errors suggested that they were influenced by the normal development of the target language (intralingual/developmental errors) and by the mother tongue of the learners (interference).