English Word Order in Written Production of Swedish Students

Abstract

This study investigates English word order errors in the written production of Swedish junior high school students. It analyzes 24 essays written by the 9th-grade students in a junior high school in Sweden in the spring semester of 2022. The research questions are to find the most frequent word order errors among this group, find answers to the main reasons for these errors, and find some helpful pedagogical hints for improving students’ writing output. In the light of previous research in this area, this study intends to find, analyze, classify, and discuss all the writing errors in word order area according to the related theories. It is a mixed-methods research design, quantitative and qualitative, to answer the research questions. The analysis of the students’ papers showed that the adverbial mid-position errors were the most frequent errors among these students, regardless of their grades. In teaching grammar, teachers need to work on grammatical analysis and structure for their students at school and the way of teaching English sentence structures plays an important role to outline student grammatical errors and show them how to avoid grammatical mistakes and errors by using different teaching methods and techniques. For this reason, teaching the grammar rules is needed – both implicitly and explicitly.