Introdution

In English, as in many other languages, one of the grammar rules is that the subjects and the verbs must
agree both in number and in person. Subject-verb agreement therefore refers to the matching of
subjects and verbs according to their number (Greenbaum and Nelson 2002: 141). This means that a
singular subject must be matched with a singular verb form: the child cries, and a plural subject must be
matched with a plural verb form: the children cry.

Pittman (2005) embarked on a similar study of subject verb agreement errors. The main reason for
conducting the study was to investigate whether a non-subject or local noun that is also a plausible
subject for the verb will cause more agreement errors than an implausible local noun.

Subject-verb (S/V) agreement mistakes are one of the most typical grammar mistakes
made by learners of English (Estling Vannestål, 2007:80). One of the reasons that Swedishlearners of
English make this mistake may be that in Swedish a verb is not conjugated depending on which subject it
follows as it only has one form in the present tense. In English on the other hand if the subject is singular
the verb needs to be singular, if the subject is plural the verb needs to be plural as well (Hoshino et al,
2009:87). This essay is a corpus study looking at Swedish student’s reflection essays and grammar
assignments in English in order to investigate how frequently subject-verb agreement mistakes do
actually occur.

According to Hoshimo et al (2009:87) what makes S/V agreement difficult is that sometimes the
grammatical number and the conceptual number do not match. Kohlmyr (2001 in Norrby,2006:24.2) has
carried out a similar research investigating grammatical errors in Swedish16-year-old learners’ written
production in English where she came to the conclusion that 18% of all errors made were concord
errors. Furthermore the results show that S/V agreement errors, or concord as Kohlmyr (2001 in Norrby,
2006:24.3) calls it, are a result of overgeneralisation of rules of the target language, in this case English.
Swedish students tend to overgeneralise the third person singular form, adding an– s to, for example
the first person singular form (Norrby, 2006:24.3)

“Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in real-world text. In some areas it is related to
computational linguistics, then at last it moves towards language processing applications” (Yousif, 2009,
p. 104). In corpus linguistics, people deal with real text produced by native speakers, whether it is
written or spoken. Therefore, it is a very useful process for identifying the most important features and
principles of any language. In addition, corpus linguistics analysis is very helpful in the teaching field,
allowing both teachers and students to benefit from it. By this kind of analysis, teachers can become
aware of their students’ weaknesses by identifying their errors. The collection of their results can
produce better teaching methods. One of the most common mistakes in standard written English is
subject-verb agreement. Marzuki and Zainal (2004) analyzed the errors of writing reports in an
examination situation and found that the most frequent error was subject-verb agreement with 95.5%
occurrence. Moreover, Adira et al. (2010) found, based on the 66 paragraphs they analyzed, that
subject-verb agreement was one of the errors which was recorded with 85 errors (7.07%). Clearly,
although making subjects and verbs agree seems easy, there are certain errors that many students
commit. The basic rule of subject-verb agreement is that a verb must agree in number and person with
its subject. Singular subjects need singular verbs; plural subjects need plural verbs (Hudson, 1998).
However, there are different versions of subject-verb agreement, and one variable involves verb tenses.
This paper explores whether EFL Saudi female students at Prince Noura University (PNU) have problems
with subject-verb agreement, particularly with the present tense of the verb to be.
Objectives
1. 1. Identify correct subject-verb agreement.

2. identify and correct errors in subject-verb agreement

3. explain the rules for subject-verb agreement
4. Recognize and use correct verb tenses with regular and irregular verbs.

5. Identify subject verb agreement errors

6. Define subject-verb agreement.

7. Identify common errors in subject-verb agreement.
8. To find the types of Subject-Verb Agreement errors which are frequently misconstructed by the
students

Review of Related Literature

According to Langan (2001:10) writing is a skill that is not different as the skills of diving, driving, and
cooking. It can be gained through hard work and practice.
To Langan (2001:11), the difficult thing of writing is walking through the process. It is difficult to deal
with the 1 thinking and the challenging. Writing seems difficult because it covers many things.

Literature
Because this study uses error analysis techniques in students’ writing, it is essential to discuss the theory
of error analysis (EA). Evidence in the literature (T. Maicusi, P. Maicusi, & Lopez, 2000; Sanal, 2008;
AbiSamra, 2003; Khodabandeh, 2007) indicates that EA was a development of contrastive analysis (CA).
Contrastive analysis stems from the behaviorist view that language learning is based on habit formation.
In addition, it viewed the mother tongue as the hindrance to learning new languages. The CA hypothesis
reinforced this view of “interference”: the learners’ existing habits prevents correct utterance, which
results in errors that are signs of the learner’s failure.
In addition, Sanal (2008) examined error analysis based on second-language teaching strategies and
found that errors are no longer seen as “unwanted forms”; instead, they indicate the student’s learning-
process level.
Therefore, errors, not mistakes, are what researchers are focusing on, and many researchers are
interested in categorizing errors and the literature containing various types of ERROR ANALYSIS OF
SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT 14 errors. For example, Gustilo and Mango (2012) classified errors as
omission errors, addition errors, misformation errors, wrong order, spelling errors, system errors, and
the like.
Sun (2010) examined other kinds of errors: misuse of words, grammatical errors, syntactic errors, and
errors of discourse construction and content.
Sanal (2008) describes interlanguage errors as the mistakes committed by learners in the TL because of
the influence of their mother tongues. The second is intralingual/developmental errors, which refer to
the TL that is being learned. Sanal (2008) describes intralanguage errors as the mistakes committed by
learners in the TL due to a lack of knowledge of that TL’s rules.
In general, corpora can be describes as “a large body of linguistic evidence typically composed of
attested language use” (Mitkov, 2003, p. 449). Also, we can say that a collection of more than one text
that is put together on a computer-readable system and used for different purposes is a corpus (Yusuf,
p. 2009). It is important for these electronic forms to be easy to access by end users to enable both
common users and researchers to use these data. Therefore, these collections can be used in corpus
linguistics, which is the study of language collected from real-world texts and ordered according to
explicit criteria. These texts must be a true replica of physical text, gathered from a genuine normal
spoken or written source (Dash, 2008). Corpus linguistic deals with real input, and it is based on the
linguist’s intuition. Thus, a corpus collector ERROR ANALYSIS OF SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT 16 must not
include any text taken from experimental conditions and/or artificial circumstances (Dash, 2008).

Studies
Zawaherh (2012) investigated the written English errors of tenth-grade students in female and male
schools in Ajloun, Jordan. The sample for the study consisted of 350 students selected randomly from a
group of schools in Ajloun. They were asked to write an essay about “a journey to the ancient city of
Jerash in Jordan” in an ordinary English-language exercise in the class. The essays were then analyzed for
errors. Zawaherh found that the most dominant error among tenthgrade students in Ajloun schools was
lack of agreement between the subject and the main verb. The number of errors due to lack of
agreement between subject and verb was 104, and the cause of these errors was Arabic interference. In
addition, the study found that omission of the verb to be occurred 3 times, and again the cause was
Arabic interference. Wahyudi (2012) attempted to analyze the errors made by a first-semester student
of the English Department, Faculty of Humanities and Culture, Maulana Malik Ibrahim State Islamic
University, Jawa Timur, Indonesia. The student was a 19-year-old male majoring in English at the
university, and he was in his first semester. He was asked to do three separate tasks, each of which
included writing essays of 250 words. The research examined the errors in subject-verb agreement of
the student’s writing, and its taxonomy was based on Duley, Burt, and Krashen (1982), who categorize
errors as those of omission, addition, misinformation, and misordering. The learner made a significant
number of errors in each task with an accuracy of 46, 42% incorrect use of verb to be agreement
(omission error = 3 times and misinformation = 12 times) ERROR ANALYSIS OF SUBJECT-VERB
AGREEMENT 20 in the first composition, 31, 58% (omission = 5 times and misinformation = 21 times) in
the second composition, and 40, 62% (omission = 3 and misinformation = 16 times) in the third
composition.
Salebi (2004) investigated Saudi college students’ perception of their errors in written English. His aim
was to find what kinds of errors Saudi female college students of EFL usually make. The subjects of the
study were 32 Saudi females aged 22–24 years old who were in the fourth level at the Department of
Foreign Languages at King Faisal University. They had attended an error analysis course where they were
taught how to identify, classify, and describe errors in English committed by second-language learners.
The research used two instruments: a test and students’ comments on their errors. The study found that
the percentage of subject-verb agreement was 44.03%. In addition, it found that the percentage of
errors caused during translation from Arabic was 18.75%. Further, it showed that the main reason for
errors was the difficulty of the target language, which resulted in generalization of rules. Stapa and
Izahar (2010) investigated errors in subject-verb agreement among Malaysian ESL learners. The study
used error analysis to explore these errors. The subjects of the study were 20 trainee teachers from a
postgraduate teaching course who were majoring in English language studies. They had at least 16 years
of experience in learning the English language. The study examined errors in five types of subject-verb
agreements: person, number, coordinated subject, indefinite expression of amount, and notional
agreement and proximity. Two types of written compositions (argumentative and factual) were analyzed
to identify the students’ problems in writing grammatically correct statements with subject-verb
agreement. The study found that ESL learners still have problems at all levels of proficiency and face
difficulties in applying the subject-verb agreement rule.
Sun (2010) applied a corpus-based study of errors in Chinese English majors’ English writing. It focuses
on the general features of errors in these students’ English writing, the reasons for those errors, the
developmental features of errors in different grades, and the reasons for those developmental features.
The research design was based on a study by Corder (1974) that suggested the following four steps in EA
research: collection of data, description of errors, explanation of errors, and evaluation of errors. The
corpus of the study consisted of compositions by English majors in Ludong University of Grade 2008,
2007, and 2006 in the first semester of the school year 2008–2009. The study found that “grammatical
errors” ranked the highest and agreement errors were estimated at 11.48%. The reasons for these
errors were vocabulary and the influence of negative transfer of the mother tongue. Gustilo and Mango
(2012) investigated learners’ errors and their evaluation of Filipino ESL writers. The aim of the study was
to examine sentence-level errors. The data of the study was collected from previous studies, and it
consisted of 150 essays written by freshmen college students during their first week of classes at Metro
Manila. The essays were processed and subjected to ratings and codings for errors. The raters were
asked to fill out open-ended questions to focus on their perspective on the different aspects of writing
that impacted the essay scores. To answer the research questions, the study used frequency counts,
standard deviations, MANOVA and NOVA results, and the data from regression analyses. The study
found that there were errors in subject-verb agreement in the verb category in the students’ writing.
Ericsson (2008) investigated the subject-verb concordance errors in writing produced by eighth-grade
students at a Swedish compulsory school. The study involved a written essay and fill-in-the-gap test
taken by twenty-four 14-year-old pupils (12 girls and 12 boys). The research hypothesis stated that
pupils would commit more errors in the essays than in the test. The ERROR ANALYSIS OF SUBJECT-VERB
AGREEMENT 22 research used quantitative methods, which involve the collection and analysis of
numerical data and statistics. The study found that in the essay task 50% of the pupils used the verb
form be (are) incorrectly due to the similarity between the Swedish single present-tense verb forms and
the English forms (the English are and the Swedish ar). In addition, the students faced some difficulties
with unmarked plurals such as “people.” Wulandari & Erni (2005) explored the analysis and classification
of subject-verb agreement errors in order to determine the frequency of concurrence of each. The
sample in the study was 48 fourth-semester students out of 245 students of the English Department at
Muhammadiyah University of Malang. The data for this study were gained from the results of a writing
test. The study found that there were 107 errors and the highest frequency of occurrence was due to
omission, followed by addition and misformation. The study also found that students still had difficulties
with the differences between singular and plural verbs or singular and plural subjects, and the highest
frequency of errors was for basic subject-verb agreement error (82.21%). Shamsudin and Mahady (2010)
applied a corpus-based study to examine the writing errors of first-year students at University Teknologi
in Malaysia. The study used 66 questionnaires, and they were distributed to first-year UTM students
from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and the Faculty of Civil Engineering. Further, students’
paragraph samples of were also used to collect data. It was found that the first-year students in the
university were still producing grammatical and lexical errors in their writing. Students writing in a
second language are faced with social and cognitive challenges related to second-language acquisition,
where CAH and EAH can be used to explain the causes of these errors. In addition, ERROR ANALYSIS OF
SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT 23 from the 66 paragraphs analyzed, a total of 1,202 errors were found, and
85 of them were correlated to subject-verb agreement (7.07%).
Website

http://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/cmchang/chapter/13-2-subject-verb-agreement/
https://www.academia.edu/31859878/MASTERY_LEVEL_ON_THE_SUBJECT-
VERB_AGREEMENT_AMONG_THE_FRESHMAN_CRIMINOLOGY_STUDENTS_THE_PROBLEM_AND_ITS_SE
TTING
http://repository.wima.ac.id/2569/2/Bab%201.pdf
http://www.awej.org/images/Theseanddissertation/DalalAl-Dhobaib/dalal_al-
dhobaib_ma_research.pdf
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/grammar/syntax-conventions-of-standard-english/subject-
verb-agreement-and-pronoun-antecedent-agreement/v/subject-verb-agreement-syntax-khan-
academy?utm_account=Grant&utm_campaignname=Grant_Science_Dynamic&gclid=CjwKCAjwnrjrBRA
MEiwAXsCc48G3kmiHMyyWTvANSjVo-ak9VUwfZiLkeqT4hKC-HxWEla_6tJqLPxoCb0wQAvD_BwE
http://www.riosalado.edu/web/oer/WRKDEV100-
20012_INTER_0000_v1/lessons/Mod01_SubjectVerbAgreementandVerbTense.shtml
https://www.academia.edu/5940532/Corpus_study_on_Subject_Verb_Agreement
https://www.ajol.info/index.php/gjl/article/viewFile/119789/109247