Common Grammatical Mistakes in Writing English as a Second Language Made By the Senior Secondary Students of Government Schools in Eastern Province

The aim of this study is to analyze the common grammatical mistakes in writing English as a second language made by senior secondary students, of government schools in Eastern province, whose mother tongue Tamil. The data were collected from twelve schools of twelve different educational zones in Eastern province which has three districts; they are Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Ampara. Thirty participants were randomly selected in each school thus totally 360 written samples of participants were taken to analyze and find the common grammatical mistakes made by them. The participants were asked to write an essay for a given topic and the written essays were marked to find the common grammatical mistakes in their writing. Therefore this exploratory study attempted to clarify the common mistakes in writing English as a second language by using qualitative approach. The finding expose that the common mistakes are on articles, punctuation, spelling, apostrophe, preposition, word choice, singular/plural, verb formation according to the tense , subject – verb agreement, predicate collapsing, run-on sentences, missing Be verb, sentence fragment and word order. Also the investigation sheds light on the remedial recommendations to assist both students and the teachers who teach English as a second language.