Thesis (MA) - Cyprus International University. Institute of Graduate Studies and Research English Language Teaching

Writing in English requires a comprehensive knowledge of syntax, vocabulary,
morphology and discursive features and the ability to make sentences that can be
easily understood by the person reading the text. For this reason, writing in English
is the part where students have the most difficulty and make mistakes in the use of
English. There are colleges in Northern Cyprus that provide education in English.
Children studying at these colleges prepare themselves for English-medium
universities such as the ones in the country and those abroad where education is
largely provided in English. The fact that English language education is so
important in Northern Cyprus is of greater importance in terms of planning and
providing students with a good English education. For this reason, the aim of this
study is to identify and examine the most common mistakes made by the seventhgrade
students of Turkish Marif College (TMK), the country's oldest public school
providing education in English, in the compositions they write, and to help create
an action plan by collecting feedback on what to do to minimize these mistakes. In
the study, compositions written by a total of sixty-five students were collected and
analysed according to error analysis theory. In the study, the most common mistakes
made by students were classified and analysed in detail. Analyses include
comparison of the number of interlingual and intralingual errors. The findings of
this study show that the most common mistakes are made in morphology. An
important result of this study is that the frequency and number of intralingual errors
are higher than interlingual errors. The most common interlingual errors concern
the use of the present tense instead of the present tense and the singular noun instead
of the plural. From the teachers' point of view, errors, if not corrected correctly, are
considered a serious obstacle in learning English as a foreign language. The results
of this study will help students internalize the rules of the target language. It will
also help teachers pay more attention to common mistakes and find other effective
techniques to enhance students' writing.