Iranian EFL Learners Speaking Errors: Identifying their Frequency and Underlying Reasons

One of the most important purposes of the current language teaching methods is to help learners develop their communicative competence However learning to communicate in another language is not without errors and mistakes mainly because of the negative transfer from L1 Identifying the most frequent errors and mistakes is important because it can help EFL teachers to predict the learners errors and also the syllabus designers to emphasize those aspects of the language in which students have more difficulties The present study aims at identifying the errors made by preintermediate Iranian EFL learners while speaking English in the class For so doing a conversation class consisting of 18 preintermediate EFL students studying in an English language institute in Mashhad City was selected During the term their authentic conversations presentations dialogues in the classroom were recorded The class was held for 22 sessions 2 hours each The collected corpus was then transcribed in order to identify the errors made by the learners The types as well as the frequency of errors were identified and tabulated It was indicated that EFL learners made different types of errors the most frequent ones were in the domain of pronunciation such as pronouncing th sound followed by some grammatical errors such as s for third person singular The whole list of the errors and the frequency of them were presented and the reasons for making each of them were discussed and the pedagogical implications were made