Error Analysis: A Study of Errors made by Pakistani ‘O-Level’ Students in Writing Urdu

Abstract

Every academic year, thousands of Pakistani students appear in the Cambridge Assessment International Education Examination of Ordinary level and take the examination of Urdu as a compulsory subject. Urdu is spoken and learned at three levels in Pakistan. Firstly, it is the mother tongue of a minority of people. Secondly, approximately 6.8 % of the population speaks Urdu as their first language. Thirdly, almost 60% of people in Pakistan learn it as a second language. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the errors made in Pakistani ‘O-level’ students’ texts in the light of the Error analysis approach of Corder (1967). Urdu is considered a challenging language owing to its cursive orthographic and largely borrowed vocabulary from Arabic, Persian, Hindi, and other native languages of the subcontinent. The paper adopts a qualitative research paradigm as the researcher aims to study students’ errors in a natural linguistic setting. The study is limited to error analysis of ‘O-level’ students in writing Urdu only. The data was collected from the formative assessment papers of the sample of purposively selected 50, ‘O-level’ students of an English medium school in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. The study achieves its objective through a detailed analysis of the corpus of 313 errors made by the subjects of the study.  The findings of the study revealed that 84.66 % of the investigated error corpus falls in the category of "single-letter errors". The findings also show that within the single letter category, the most frequent errors were “substitution errors” which is 58.49 % of the category. Moreover, the findings reflect that the visual and phonetic similarity of letters may have caused a comparatively high ratio of substitution errors in the single letter category.  Finally, the study suggests some pedagogical implications for teachers to enhance students’ ability to write error-free Urdu. Special focus on visually and phonetically similar letters, carefully designed practice exercises, differentiation of the functions of letters with their placement at the initial, middle and final stage of words, and regular feedback of errors may contribute to the improvement of the students in this regard.