Five Most Common Errors in Narrative Essay

Abstract

Malaysian students are required to go through at least 11 years of primary and secondary schooling and are required to take English language subject every year. With at least 11 years of learning English language, students should be able to master the language and speak and write fluently. However, that is not the case for many students in Malaysia. Despite learning English for more than a decade, many students who have reached their tertiary level of education still perform grammatical mistakes in writing. Thus this study is intended to present the grammatical errors made by Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK) students in their narrative essay. One hundred students’ written narrative essays were analysed and the findings revealed that most grammatical errors were categorized under verb tense, omission, noun, subject-verb Agreement (SVA) and to and infinitive verbs. The findings of the study will provide useful implication for teachers on students’ possible grammatical errors in narrative essay writing and will feed teachers with ideas on the type of common grammatical errors to focus on when teaching narrative essay.