Post-Secondary Arabian Gulf Students and Their State of English: Common Grammatical, Spelling, and Pronunciation Errors

Abstract

Having hardly learnt any English or having at best learnt wrong English (which is worse than no English) during their junior and secondary school years and having little or no exposure to English outside their classrooms, and partly due to certain weaknesses and shortcomings in what the teachers teach and how they teach, college students in some Arabian Gulf countries, with few exceptions, of course, continue to make (even after five years of English) silly, sloppy, lousy, and awkward errors/mistakes—grammatical, spelling, and pronunciation—in writing as well as speaking. The density of such errors is ridiculously high. This article provides some details and makes some suggestions about how to help students improve.