A Morphosyntactic Analysis on Malaysian Secondary School Students’ Essay Writing in English Class
Nael F. M. Hijjo

Abstract
Morphosyntactic issues are part of our competence debates in the shape of written form which reflects our ignorance about language rules or misconception about the domain.This paper investigates the morphosyntactic issuesand grammatical errors in English written essays of Malaysian secondary school students in English course. It analyzes tenstudents’ essays(50 pages) in the light of Chomsky’s (1995) the Minimalist Program using X-Bar theory to represent the tree diagram.The research paper aims to focus on the morphosyntactic issues that lead to the grammatical errors which take placein the English writing of Malaysiansecondary school students. The findings suggest that the Malaysian students are not fully aware how to use the plural mark ‘s’ as well the ‘3rd singular’ in present tense. Moreover, they cannot build a simple sentence due to the different word-order and sentence structure between Malay language and English in term of morphology and syntax.

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