A Study of Errors in the English Essays of Part II Students of the Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Maiduguri

This study is on the common grammatical and spelling errors of selected essays of part II students of the Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria. With the application of the random sampling technique, fifty (50) students partook in the essay writing on the topic ‘The Importance of English Composition in Schools’ in which thirty (30) essays were selected for this study. The essays were textually and critically read and the errors were identified. The result reveals that the most frequent types of errors made by the participants are grammatical and spelling errors. It further shows that writing in English as a second language is quite challenging for L2 students. This is a result of the interference and intralingua transfers which are found to be the major causes of the most common errors discovered during this study.