An analysis of subject agreement errors in English: the case of third year students at the national university of Lesotho

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to study the linguistic environments in which subject-verb agreement errors occur in students’ academic work. The paper also aims to find out if these errors were competence or performance errors. The study was conducted at the National University of Lesotho (NUL). The study had a two stage research design. In the first stage, students wrote a test in their field of study. In this test, no focus on subject-verb agreement was included. The test scripts were used to identify subject-verb agreement errors and the linguistic environments in which such errors occurred. In the second stage, a follow up test was given to the same group of students. They were given sentences which were a mixture of correct, incorrect and ambiguous sentences and were asked to evaluate the grammaticality of the sentences by putting a tick after the correct sentences and a cross after the incorrect ones. For the incorrect sentences they were to underline the error and give the correct answer. The main findings of the study were: subject-verb agreement errors are prominent in simple sentence constructions and in complex linguistic environments. The study also found that performance errors appear frequently in simple sentence construction (simple errors) while competence errors are found to be prominent in complex linguistic environments.