Morphological errors in short paragraph writing in English as a foreign language

The study addresses the persistence of morphological errors in the writing of short paragraphs in English as a foreign language by university-level students, which compromises textual accuracy, clarity, and coherence. A qualitative and descriptive design was used, addressing a sample of 28 students. For data collection, a writing activity with several components was recorded, including a worksheet with fill-in-the-blank activities, sentence ordering, and an assignment in which students had to write a descriptive paragraph about a memory or hobby. and for the analysis, a checklist was used, which was framed within the taxonomy of surface strategies (omission, addition, substitution, and disorder) and adjusted to the error analysis framework. Of the results, omission was identified as the most common (8; 33.33%), while substitution occurred in 7 cases (29.16%); addition and disorder were found with the same frequency (5; 20.83% each). It was identified that the lack of morphology was the result of L1 interference, literal translation, and a lack of systematic instruction and application of morphological awareness and grammar. The teaching of morphology should be strengthened in an explicit and contextualized manner.