An Analysis of Grammatical Errors in Written Narratives of Mentally Retarded Students Atoosa Rostambeik Tafreshi

Goal: This study aims at analyzing and categorizing different grammatical errors including morpho-syntactic and syntactic errors in written narratives of mentally retarded students in Tehran. The frequencies of errors are compared among students in different grades. Descriptive-Analytic method has been used. A test consisted of four picture stories have been administered to 125 students in elementary (3rd, 4th,5th grades) and pre-vocational (1st,2nd,3rd grades) levels studying at four schools for mentally retarded students according to systematic random sampling. Findings and Number of clauses in the students’ naratives in different grades are as follows: third: 68, fourth: 424, fifth: 289, and in prevocational level: first:338, second: 413, third: 479. morpho-syntactic errors can be classified into wrong tense, mood, and aspect inflections, lack of verb-object agreement , and lack of noun-pronoun agreement while the first is the most frequent one. Syntactic errors are classified into inversion, deletion, insertion, substitution, and ungrammatical scrambling while deletion is the most frequent one. The frequency of grammatical errors decreases in secondary level comparing to elementary. Syntactic errors consists 51 percent and morho-syntactic 49 percent of the grammatical errors.