الفهرس 
AcknowledgmentsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 264 |  |  |
| | | from | 264 | | |
Abstract
This study aims at investigating and analysing the grammatical errors made by non-majoring in English students of Al Azhar University in writing English. The study adopted the descriptive analytical research method. The data of the study was collected from a composition writing test. The test was administered to a total sample of 100 first year students studying at the university. It was made sure that the above mentioned tool satisfied the criteria of validity and reliability. The findings of the study revealed inappropriate levels and low abilities of the students in understanding and using grammatical rules properly in writing. This was reflected in the enormous number of grammatical errors made by the respondents. In the test, a total number of 853 grammatical errors were found in the analysis. These errors were first classified into different categories. Errors in definite and indefinite articles and verbs were found to be the most frequent ones, while those of negatives have the least frequent ones. The findings also revealed that most of the errors made by the students in their English written texts were due to two major causes the first cause is their ignorance of rules and insufficient knowledge of how to employ and use several English rules by applying them wrongly in their sentences. The second one is the negative transfer from the mother tongue, that’s Arabic, because they seemed to be greatly affected and influenced by Arabic. Moreover, some students were found to translate literally from Arabic into English during their writing. In the light of the study findings, the researcher emphasized that, constant practice and drilling are very essential for the students to pick up the correct grammatical usage. Several suggestions and recommendations were made by the researcher that could assist in reducing grammatical errors, promoting students’ writing abilities and helping general English learners to avoid these errors and other ones in the future.