Morpho-Syntactic Error Analysis in Written Compositions of MTB-MLE Policy Students

Abstract

 This study reports the dominant linguistic errors in the written composition of Grade 7 Hiligaynon-speaking students in one of the public secondary schools in the Philippines. Following the initial implementation of the MTB-MLE policy, it attempts to identify the structures of English, especially in the domains of morphology and syntax that may have been influenced by the students’ mother tongue. More significantly, it identifies the sources of errors made by students. Questionnaires that contained narrative essay topics were distributed among the respondents for personal narrative writing. Errors were identified, categorized, described, and explained using error analysis method. Forty-four categories of errors were classified to find out the sources of morpho-syntactic errors, dominant errors and weak areas that occurred in written compositions. In terms of surface structures, errors had been identified including addition of unnecessary article, omission of verb, misinformation in word class and misordering of major constituents in sentences. The study identified three sources which triggered learners’ errors: intralingual, interlingual and communicative strategy. However, the majority of the errors were attributed to intralingual sources which mainly resulted from lack of grammatical and lexical knowledge and faulty sentence formation.