LEXICAL ERROR ANALYSIS IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL EFL CLASSROOM

Abstract

The main goal of this research is the quantitative and qualitative analysis of lexical errors in spoken discourse in English language teaching of pupils in the 9th grade of primary schools in the northern, central and southern parts of Montenegro. The analysis was carried out between 2013 and 2018. The corpus of this paper consists of audio-recording of 30 English classes, each lasting 45 minutes. This provided relevant data that enabled the identification of errors and the conclusions that are presented in this paper. Comparative analysis was used to check whether there were significant differences in the number and type of errors among the pupils from the three regions. The quantitative analysis showed that the total number of errors is 1,311. The results show that (1) the largest number of errors in the central part of Montenegro relate to the incorrect use of verbs in translating sentences; (2) in the southern and northern parts the largest number of errors relate to the incorrect use of prepositions; (3) the fewest errors cause by interference appear in the northern part; and (4) the incorrect use of words (in terms of their meaning) was not identified in any of the regions. These results may be interesting for the educational authorities, helping them create adequate curricula and develop appropriate classroom activities in the English language classroom.