RUAHA CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

This paper analyse errors in students’ written examinations. The study was conducted at Ruaha Catholic University and University of Iringa, involving 82 samples of written University examinations scripts. 41 sample scripts from Ruaha Catholic University as well 41 sample scripts from University of Iringa. This paper deals with a very important aspect that may improve second language teaching and learning as it reveals the most common mistake/errors made by University prospective teachers specifically those studying English courses. This means if the findings are interpreted into policy and action, this study would yield a significant role in students’ performance rate.The findings revealed that six types of errors are committed by students, these errors include; verb tenses, subject verb agreement, capitalization, punctuation, prepositions and articles. Most errors originate from native language popularly known as mother tongue (L1), thus errors originate from L1 interference. The duty of psycholinguistics especially those trained in nonnative language learning is systematic descriptions of learning errors.

Errors, morph syntax, student teacher, prospective, target language, second language.