Mother Tongue Traces of Turkish University Students on Composition Papers Written in English

摘要

The aim of this study was to determine the interference errors on the composition papers of Turkish university students. While Turkish university students learning English are writing compositions, they sometimes confront difficulties related to proper word choices, grammatical structures and other aspects of the language due to the differences of these two languages. The aim of the study was, therefore, to determine inter-lingual errors on the composition papers written in English. 436 papers written by 26, intermediate level, preparatory class students (3 male, 23 female), and 642 papers written by 42 upper intermediate level students (11 male and 31 female), were examined in this study. According to the result of the study, the highest ranking interference errors of Turkish university EFL students were “word for word translation”, omitting the indefinite article, subject-verb agreement and number, quantifier and noun agreement. The study also revealed that intermediate level students committed more errors than those who were upper-intermediate and that most errors were general errors, not interference errors. And also it was clear from the present study that as the level of the students got higher, the number of the errors and interference errors got lower.