Since the teaching of English as second or foreign language, it has been the dream of all the teachers that their
students should compose error-free piece of writing. The primary goal of this study is to explore morphosyntactic
errors of Pakistani O Level students while writing English narratives. The study was conducted in
five leading schools of O Level in Lahore, Pakistan. The most important errors found in the students essays
included: tense, subject/verb agreement, spellings, punctuation, articles and prepositions. The errors were
classified according to frequency and percentage in the students narratives. The research sample consisted of
200 students who were asked to compose a narrative write up reflecting their attitudes and opinions towards
the writing skill of English language. The findings revealed that the Pakistani O Level students make different
types of morpho-syntactic errors which are mostly due to intralingual transfer, though interlanguage errors
are not an exception. It was suggested that the English writing skills of Pakistani O Level students need
extensive practice for meeting international examination standards
Key words: Error analysis, English Second Language, first language, language acquisition, language learning,
morphological errors, syntactical errors, frequency of occurrence, tense, subject/verb agreement, spellings,
punctuation, articles and prepositions
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