ERROR ANALYSIS OF SERBIAN EFL STUDENTS’ REPORTED QUESTIONS

Abstract

This research is aimed at uncovering the errors Serbian native speakers make when reporting questions in English, so that those errors could be addressed more effectively in the practice of teaching English as a Foreign Language in the Republic of Serbia. For this purpose, a diagnostic test was made and distributed to the students of the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, who had taken up English as an elective course. Then, error analysis was applied to the tests. It was found that students had managed to report the questions without error in only 54% of cases. The largest number of errors made pertained to retaining the interrogative word order when reporting questions, often coupled with the omission of if or whether and retention of the auxiliary verb do, as well as failure to apply backshift. Some instances of incorrectly shifted tense were also found. To a small extent, some unexpected errors also occurred (the employment of the wrong grammatical person, subject-verb disagreement, as well as the use of ungrammatical verb forms), but some of these occurrences could potentially be attributed to extralinguistic factors and thus deemed mistakes instead. Given that the official student achievement standards in the Republic of Serbia stipulate that English reported questions should be mastered by the end of secondary education, the results indicate that this structure has not been sufficiently adopted and that additional attention should be paid to it in teaching.