An Error Analysis of Letter Writing Skill: Pakistani Students’ Deviation of Target Language Rules

This study aims to identify one of the most common error types in formal letter writing in the target language grammatical errors produced by Pakistani secondary school students. Letter writing is a skill that requires appropriate syntactic structures and the accurate use of punctuation marks, as each component of a formal letter follows specific linguistic conventions. However, students frequently commit errors in these areas. The present study is limited to exploring grammatical errors in letter writing, as relatively little research has addressed this specific domain in the Pakistani context. Pakistani students were selected as the target population because English is learned as a second/target language, increasing the likelihood of linguistic errors in written communication. The sample consisted of 50 tenth-grade students from Allied School, Multan, who were asked to write a letter to their sister congratulating her on her success. Hubbard’s four levels of Error Analysis were employed to analyze the data, including grammatical, syntactic, substance, and lexical errors. The findings reveal that grammatical errors were the most frequent, accounting for 35.42% of the total errors, whereas lexical errors were the least frequent, comprising 9.9%. Based on the results, the study offers pedagogical suggestions for teachers and learners, as well as recommendations for future researchers, to address and minimize errors more effectively.