Error Analysis of Korean Adult EFL Learners’ Oral Production of English Interrogative Sentences

The purpose of this study is to examine the errors made by Korean adult EFL learners. To this end, it analyzed the spoken responses of the Question Elicitation task, one of all 10 tasks such as Read-aloud, Dialogue Completion, Map-cued Elicitation of Directions, Question and Answer-open-Ended, Question Elicitation, Paraphrasing a Short Narrative, Oral Interviews, Discussions, Picture-cued Storytelling, and Retelling a Story, from 82 adults who were attending a language institute for the purpose of learning English conversation. They were interviewed one-on-one for 25 minutes for the 10 tasks without any interaction with the interlocutor to elicit as much vocal production as possible. The spoken data elicited from the Question Elicitation task were analyzed by employing QSR NVivo 2.0. One finding was that misformation was found to be the most frequent error, followed by fluency errors, omission errors, addition errors, and misordering errors. Another noteworthy finding was that learners often used incorrect forms for pronouns and tense and tended to omit the plural suffix -s and prepositions. In addition, open-ended questions were dominantly used compared to closed questions. Based on these findings, this study suggests that adult learners should be continually provided with contexts and activities in which they can practice the different use of interrogative sentences.