An Evaluation of Arab Students’ Turkish Writing Skills

In this study, writing skills of Arab students learning Turkish as a foreign language is analysed with respect to error analysis approach. This study has been performed on 20 Arab students who have learned Turkish in Istanbul University. The data of the study are obtained by asking students to write 250-300-words compositions about “What did you think about Turkey before coming to this country?” Obtained data is classified as follows; grammatical errors, syntactic errors, lexical errors and spelling/punctuation errors. Then, these errors are evaluated according to error analysis approach as negative transfer errors and developmental errors. The result of evaluation put forward that 372 errors consists of 16,39 % grammatical error, 13,17% syntactic error, 15,59 % lexical error 54,58 % spelling/punctuation error. Besides, it is observed that students’ grammatical errors are mostly * Dr., İstanbul Üniversitesi Yabancı Diller Bölümü. El-mek: fbolukbas@istanbul.edu.tr