Junior secondary school students' intralingual errors in essays written in French language

This study set out to identify students’ intralingual errors in the essays written in French. The study adopted the ex-post facto design, using the content analysis technique. The population comprised 2,893 copies of descriptive essays written in French Language by year 3 junior secondary school students in the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in 2015, 2016 and 2017 in Imo State. The sample of 228 essays was selected through stratified, purposive and proportionate random sampling techniques. The three instruments for the study were the question papers on French Language, the students’ answer scripts and a researcher-designed Checklist of Intralingual Errors for Learning French (CIELF). The data from the error analysis were subjected to analysis using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and the research question that guided the study was answered in percentages. The results showed that the students committed eight intralingual errors, which include overgeneralization, omission, addition, simplification of parts of speech, misinformation, agreement, verb forms and mechanical errors. Part of the recommendations is for teachers of French to build language instructions on students’ prior knowledge and experiences, thereby making French language learning to be real and interesting to the students.