A SYNTACTIC ERROR ANALYSIS OF EFL ARAB LEARNERS: THE CASE STUDY OF PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN SAUDI ARABIA

Primary school students might find the process of learning syntax confusing and complex presumably due to being unaware of the syntactic errors they make at this early stage. Yet, despite the complexity of such an issue, scant research has been conducted in the Saudi context. Therefore, the present study employs a mixed-method approach to examine the developmental sequences of acquiring syntactic rules and investigate the syntactic errors made by 60 EFL primary school Arab students in a Saudi international school using spoken interviews, written tests, and in-class observations. After analyzing the data quantitatively and qualitatively, it was found that the most common syntactic errors produced by EFL Arab primary school students are related to tense formation, subject-verb agreement, missing articles, conjunctions, pronouns to infinitives, and word order syntactic patterns. Furthermore, verb tense, articles, and copula have been determined as transfer errors. In addition, older children make fewer syntactic errors compared to younger children. Despite the significant results, more samples are needed to make them generalizable. Keywords: Error analysis, syntactic errors, developmental sequences, EFL.