Syntactic Errors in Armenian Learners’ Spoken Production

Abstract

This study aimed at investigating the syntactic errors in the spoken production of Armenian EFL learners. The syntactic errors were identified and classified in 11 relevant categories. The statistical analyses showed that the most frequent errors occur in the usage of articles and inversion in WHquestions. The errors of those 2 categories were analyzed with the means of contrastive and error analyses and their possible sources were proposed. The contrastive and error analysis of the most frequent errors revealed that the sources of those errors may be the interlingual transfer, intralingual transfer and the communication and learning strategies employed by the learners. It was also observed that the same error may be caused by more than one factor; there were many cases of errors when the source might be both the interlingual and intralingual transfer.