MOST COMMON GRAMMAR ERRORS MADE BY FRESHMEN STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PRIZREN "UKSHIN HOTI"

This study aims to find out the multitude of students’ grammatical errors made by freshmen students at the University of Prizren “Ukshin Hoti”. This study is motivated by the intention to further investigate the common difficulties faced by Albanian students in their use of English as a foreign language. Errors made by Albanian students learning English as a FL have not been studied in-depth up to now, so this study on the types of mistakes/errors and especially its analysis of psychological, social and educational factors of errors and mistakes comes as a necessity of the time for improving English learning. Therefore, the present study is a source of information of the matter in question that is intended to find out the students’ grammatical errors in their efforts to master English and methods and materials needed to overcome and to counter this problem. The findings revealed that spelling, capitalization, tenses, punctuation, articles, varied words, subject-verb agreement, and prepositions were the most common types of linguistic errors found in the students’ use of English. These errors could be due to overgeneralization in the target language, resulting from ignorance of rule restriction and incomplete application of rules and interference resulting from first language (Albanian) negative transfer. The study will serve teachers and students involved in the field of English language teaching and learning, in general, and error correction in writing and speaking English as a FL, in particular. The study emphasizes the necessity for training future teachers with modern methods and techniques of evaluation, self-assessment and error correction. Along with the discussion of findings, limitations of the present study are discussed, and directions for further research are highlighted.