A Study on Orthographic Errors among University Tamil Students

Abstract

Education is a process of providing systematic instruction, particularly at a school or university or any institution. Education is based on teaching and learning which includes language. In language learning processes committing errors is a common phenomenon. Students commit various types of errors when they learn language. One such error is termed as orthographic error. This type of error is committed by the students when they write a language. Error analysis is considered as a process in learning and research. Usually, error analysis, studies the types and causes of language errors which are classified according to the modality and linguistic levels. Linguistics is one of the disciplines which study a language scientifically. The linguistics analysis is used to fit the errors within the types of phonological errors for this study. The errors committed are classified as, errors committed through mispronunciation, errors committed through uncommon words, errors committed through borrowed words and positions of phoneme in orthographic errors. The descriptive research method is used for this study. Corpora were collected from 150 compositions. Out of these 150 samples collected, 141 were from female students and 9 were from male students. The errors are discussed in this article in detail with the collected corpora. This study identifies the errors committed by the Tamil students from a renowned university in Malaysia. The finding of the study reveals that, a total number of 184 errors are identified.