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The Performance of Iraqi EFL University Students in Using Subject Verb Concord: An Error Analysis | ||
| Journal of University of Babylon | ||
| Article 1, Volume 18, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 955-963 | ||
| Author | ||
| Muneer Ali Khudhayer | ||
| Abstract | ||
| In English, the term concord refers to the correspondence between two grammatical items in which a form of one item involves a corresponding form of another. The most important kind of concord in English is between subject and verb: 1 He Smiles. 2 They smile. The problem arises from the state that most Iraqi EFL university students may encounter difficulties in using concord in English because students are often confused in establishing a correspondence between subjects and verbs which may result from their misunderstanding of some rules of concord. The present study aims at: 1.Identifying the performance of Iraqi EFL university students in using different types of concord in English. 2.Identifying the sourses of the students’ errors so that remedial suggestions can be put in this regard. It is hypothesized that most Iraqi EFL university students face difficulties in using subject-verb concord in English. To achieve the aims of this study, the following steps will be followed: 1. Presenting a theoretical study about concord in English. 2. Selecting a sample of Iraqi EFL university students; fourth year in a diagnostic test designed to find out the difficulties they face in using concord in English and investigating their performance at the recognition and production levels. 3. Analyzing the findings of the test to identify learners’ errors and classify these errors according to their sources as well as suggesting the remedies. 2. Concord in English Quirk and Greenbaum (1973: 176)define concord as the correspondence between two grammatical units in a sentence. The most important type of concord in English is concord of number between subject and verb in that a singular subject requires a singular verb and a plural subject takes a plural verb: 3 He plays football. 4 They play football. These two sentences represent the correspondence between subjects and verbs. In sentence (3) a singular subject (he) requires a singular verb (plays) while in sentence (4) a plural subject (they) requires a plural verb (play). Therefore, concord of number and person are achieved in these sentences. For purposes of concord, a subject in the form of clause or prepositional phrase counts as singular: 5 To deal with them as kids is not correct. 6 After the exams is the time to relax. | ||
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