Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Proceedings of the 1st GlobELT Conference on Teaching and Learning English as an Additional Language, Antalya, Türkiye, 16 - 19 Nisan 2015, cilt.199, ss.298-304
Although errors are accepted inevitable in the foreign language learning, they give information about teaching-learning process of the students. The fact that even ELT students' exam papers contain lots of serious errors has led to this research to find the reasons for them. With this aim, the exam papers of ELT students were examined in terms of their overall quality and the errors the students have made and they were listed according to their types. This study is a qualitative study which reflects the errors of students in their exam papers. To get the data, document analysis was conducted. The documents are the exam papers of sophomore and junior students of ELT department of Akdeniz University. It was found out that ELT students have problems in expressing their own ideas on any topic by analysing the situation. Besides, most of them are not careful with their writing, in terms of grammar, syntax and spelling. Some errors can be regarded as careless errors when the exam situation is considered. However, some of them result from overgeneralization of rules. Some errors occur because of the effect of the native language or students' inefficiency to use correct structures in writing although they know everything by heart. It is important for ELT students to use the language accurately as they are English teacher candidates. To overcome the problem, foreign language teaching and testing processes should be taken into consideration. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.