Application of Error Analysis to Evaluate the Writings of Students of Arabic in the University of Kurdistan

Language learning is an indispensable skill in the current era for communication and understanding. The skills to be learned include: speaking, listening, reading and writing. Writing has a significant place among these four basic skills in every language because it affects the three other skills and makes them deepened and developed. The method of error analysis is one of the methods recently used in applied linguistics to study how a foreign language is taught and treated. Iranian educational system for the teaching of Arabic language needs to reconsider the methods of instruction according to the new methods of teaching the language in our time. In this paper, using the method of error analysis and the descriptive-analytical approach, we try to study the weakness of the students in Arabic language writing and its challenges. The results indicated that errors in students’ Arabic writing include the following linguistic structures: the influence of the mother tongue on the target language, the genitive structure, the descriptive structure, the pronoun conformity of the reference, agreement of the verb with the subject, and finding proper equivalent for Persian words. It was also found that frequent errors are due to the use of grammar-translation method; so, this method should be abandoned and the learning process should be developed and improved by using new successful methods such as the audio-lingual method or the communicative one with the help of applied linguistics.