Students' Fossilized Writing Errors: EFL Postgraduates at Jordanian Universities as a Model

Abstract

The present study aimed at identifying the writing errors across EFL postgraduates' English essays, at Jordanian universities together with providing implications for practice of such errors. The study entailed two research phases. In phase one, an essay writing test was administered to 57 EFL postgraduate students in three Jordanian universities as following a descriptive research design. Their writing errors were identified and classified. The study concluded that most these errors are related to grammar as well as to article use. However, in phase two of the study, 24 essays were collected from six participants as lending a case study research design. More specifically, checking whether postgraduates consistently make the same linguistic forms for four essays in two subsequent semesters shows a lack of knowledge and eventually a fossilized error. Nonetheless, the study did not focus only on students' infrequent errors, but also on repeated ones. The study reported that there were a large number of writing errors and with varying degrees. The utmost fossilized errors explored by this study were those of article, grammar, number, relative clauses and style. Finally, the study presented a few potential pedagogical implications that may help postgraduates to reduce fossilization.