Subject-Verb Agreement Errors in Young Norwegian EFL Learners

Sammanfattning: The present study investigates changes in subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors in young Norwegian EFL learners’ written production from 8th to 10th grade. The study aimed to see if the frequency and type of SVA errors changed as the learners became more proficient. An error analysis was conducted on texts from the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) online corpus. The analysis included 52 texts from 26 students, giving two texts from each student, one from 8th grade (Y8) and one from 10th grade (Y10). The SVA errors in the data were identified and categorized by the variables: verb type, subject type, and distance between the subject and the verb. Errors involving the verb BE were categorized as suppletive agreement errors and sorted based on the verb tense since the verb BE marks agreement with suppletive forms in both the past and the present tense. Meanwhile, errors related to other verbs, including lexical verbs and auxiliaries HAVE and DO, were categorized as affixal agreement errors. The affixal agreement errors were further divided into omission errors where the 3rd person singular -s was missing and overgeneralization errors where the -s ending was erroneously used on a verb with a plural subject. Previous corpus-based studies on SVA errors suggest that young Scandinavian EFL learners (ages 14-16) make more overgeneralization errors than omission errors. The results from this study indicate that the students make more omission errors which can be explained by language transfer in 8th grade, and more overgeneralization errors as their English production has developed in 10th grade. Moreover, the overall frequency of the SVA errors in the data increased from 8th to 10th grade.