Error analysis of written texts of elementary school monolingual and bilingual Persian students

In any stage of language arts learning, the learners may have some errors. The study of these errors gives the teachers and educational experts, useful data about the amount of success of teaching methods and educational materials. In spite of the importance of writing in educational and social development, Iranian monolingual & bilingual students have significant errors in their writing. In this article, we study the writing errors of Iranian monolingual & bilingual elementary school students according to theoretical basis of error analysis. We study 110 compositions which were produced by fifth grade elementary school students: one group from Tehran city as monolinguals (70 compositions) & the other group from Nir city in Ardebil province as bilinguals (40 compositions). The writing errors were categorized in 4 groups: spelling, lexical, structural and discourse_ based. In both groups of students all 4 categories of writing errors have been observed. Moreover, the structural errors were the most frequent ones among both monolingual and bilingual groups. Comparison of writing errors of the two groups of participants showed that although the structural errors of the monolingual group were less than 18% (compared to the bilingual group); however, monolingual group had more spelling and discourse-based errors compared to bilingual one. The results of this research could be useful in developing educational textbooks and revising the methods of Farsi education.