An Error Analysis of English Indefinite Articles: A Case Study of English Department Students in the Faculty of Arts, Beni-Suef University

Recent research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) emphasizes the significance of learners’ errors as they help to predict the difficulties involved in acquiring an FL/SL. This study is an attempt to identify and classify the errors made by Arabic speaking EFL learners in their use of the English indefinite articles "a" and "an", which have no equivalent in Arabic. The subjects of the present study are 35 first-year students at the English Department, Faculty of Arts, Beni-Suef University. The researcher uses a translation test for data collection. To analyze students’ errors, the researcher adopts Corder’s (1973) model of error analysis. This model consists of five steps: (1) data collection, (2) identification of errors, (3) description of errors, (4) explanation of errors, and (5) evaluation of errors. Participants’ errors are classified into three main categories, namely, omission, addition, and substitution, based on the Surface Structure Taxonomy (SST) adapted from Duly, Burt, and Krashen (1982). These major categories are further classified, according to error source, into interlingual and intralingual errors for the purpose of finding out the role of L1 (Arabic) and L2 (English) in learners’ article misuse.