Abstract:
This study seeks to explore the causes behind the difficulties that EFL students at
Mohamed Khider Biskra University encounter in writing and to demonstrate the important
place that corrective feedback holds in the teaching of writing. It attempts to demonstrate
some frequent problems often found in the writings of EFL students at Biskra University
from both interlingual and intralingual angles. It tries also to show that the role of teachers’
error correction is decisively substantial in fostering students’ written performance though
its importance has been strongly debated for decades. The first hypothesis raised in this
study states that interlingual and intralingual interference may be two main causes of errors
which most students produce at various stages in writing and the second hypothesis
suggests that if teachers provide effective corrective feedback, they may promote students’
written production. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the research collects
the data first by means of teachers’ questionnaires distributed to all teachers of written
expression in the Branch of English Studies in the Department of Foreign Languages at
Mohamed Khider Biskra University. Then, the essays of thirty EFL students were analyzed
to identify, describe and classify the different types of errors and finally diagnose their
sources. The last means of data collection was a pre-experimental design in which a study
group was exposed to an instructional treatment in the form of permanent and clear
corrective feedback in order to observe the progress in the students’ posttest. The results
reveal that there is a great necessity to identify and diagnose the factors that cause
students’ recurrent errors in writing in order to be able to respond to them thoughtfully by
implementing effective corrective feedback.
