QUESTION FORMATION ERRORS AMONG EFL LEARNERS AT SOHAR UNIVERSITY: FREQUENCY, TYPES, AND L1 INTERFERENCE

IJASOSInternational E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. XI, Issue 33, December 2025 http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 45 QUESTION FORMATION ERRORS AMONG EFL LEARNERS AT SOHAR UNIVERSITY: FREQUENCY, TYPES, AND L1 INTERFERENCE Abdullah Almaqbali1*, and Malek Ibrahim Mohammed Al. Omari2 1Assistant Professor Dr. at Sohar University, Faculty of Language Studies, Sultanate of Oman, [email protected] 2Mr., Lecturer at Sohar University, General Foundation Program, Sultanate of Oman, [email protected].om *Corresponding Author Abstract The cultural requirements of students as well as the specific language in a variety of regions should be studied to create suitable material and a curriculum which best suits the specific needs of the learners. This study attempts to explore the reasons behind the difficulties that Omani students face in forming English questions and provides some to improve learning and teaching English question formation. Two research tools have been used, which are quantitative and qualitative. The results of the data collection show that the most common types of errors produced by learners while trying to ask questions are in the Auxiliary omission and auxiliary replacement. The researcher then tried to figure out the possible reasons behind such errors and how the students utilize L1 to produce L2 in questions formation. The results of this study serve both teachers (particularly foreign teacher who are non-Arabic speaker) and students who learn English as a foreign language. Such studies will raise Omani students' awareness of the difficulties in mastering the structures of English questions. Hopefully it will help to identify suitable solutions to reduce learners' repeated occurrence of common mistakes. Keywords: Questions, Errors, EFL learners. 1. INTRODUCTION Many studies show that some English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners face difficulties in learning English at various levels and with different skills. Nobody can deny that English is a vital tool for trade, communication and worldwide exchange. There has been a lot of research focusing on the problems and needs of Arab EFL students learning and teaching English. According to a British Council seminar (Shih, 2022), it is important to study the cultural requirements of students as well as the specific language in a variety of regions in order to create suitable material and a curriculum which best suits the specific needs of the learners. Umale shows that one of the most common learning difficulties that Arab students of English as a second language face is the area of question formation (Umale, 2011). The issue under investigation becomes more important since question formation is necessary in learning and teaching LFL as it is of important value to students. Questions play an effective role in all interaction between learners and their teachers, and this takes place at all stages of teaching. 1.1 Study Background The context of this study is GFP Department at Sohar University in Sultanate of Oman. The majority of students in the program are Omani males and females from the age of eighteen to twenty-two. The role of GFP is to prepare students to join the faculty in programmes such as Business, Computing and Information https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18032810 DOI IJASOSInternational E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. XI, Issue 33, December 2025 http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 46 Technology, Engineering, Arts and Law, and English Studies. They are meant to be able to study in their programmes through English and at university academic level (Almoqbali, 2016; Al Maqbali, & Mohin, 2022; Al-Moqbali, & Al-Amrani, 2021). This programme consists of three levels of learning English which are elementary, pre-intermediate and intermediate. They also study Computing, Mathematics and Study Skills alongside English during their time in GFP. Since the focus of the study is question formation, it is of value to give a brief overview of what is covered in the curriculum of each level. In elementary school, much attention is put on grammar correctly formed sentences and questions (i.e., question construction and structure). In pre -intermediate, the main objective is to ask and answer general questions orally. As for the intermediate level, students are expected to be able to ask and answer questions perfectly. 1.2. The problem statement Arab EFL learners face many obstacles when they try to create accurate formation of questions in English. What worsens this issue is the fact that even some of brilliant students at Arab universities are frequently heard misusing English questions. For example, they produced such questions as: 1. When we finish the semester? 2. Why it is necessary to answer all the questions? 3. Where we can put this book? Many researches discuss this issue in their studies, (Ahmed, 2023) and many states that this issue starts to emerge at a very early stage of learning English at Arab institutes. It is considered one of the biggest problems that Arab EFL students face. Therefore, this research attempts to provide some solutions to sort out such issues. 1.3. Research Objectives This study will attempt to figure out the reasons behind the difficulties that Omani students face in forming English questions and some suggestions and recommendations will be made about ways to improve learning and teaching English question formation. Another important aim behind this study is that it will raise Omani students' awareness of the difficulties in mastering the structures of English questions. Hopefully it will help to identify suitable solutions to reduce learners' repeated occurrence of common mistakes. 1.4. Research Questions The research attempts to answer the following paper questions: 1. How common is question formation error in Sohar University EFL students? 2. What types of errors do students make? 3. To what extent are such errors likely to be caused by L1 interference 1.5. Literature Review Students learn a second language, they are not only acquiring linguistic rules, but they also utilize several strategies in order to produce the L2. Selinker defines such strategies as "cognitive activities relating to the processing of second language data in the attempt to express meaning." Selinker (1972) determines the nature of a learner’s IL by outlining five central learning processes. The strategies are as follows: 1) Language transfer 2) Transfer of training 3) L2 learning strategies 4) L2 communication strategies 5) Overgeneralization of TL rules. In order to understand the case discussed in this article, it is important to introduce the theoretical aspects. Therefore, this chapter tries to describe terms that are used in order to reflect on the strategies above. IJASOSInternational E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. XI, Issue 33, December 2025 http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 47 2-LANGUAGE TRANSFER Generally, Language transfer is known as rules in the learners’ language being noticeable to their first language .Brown (2007) defines it as “the interaction of previously acquired linguistic and/or conceptual knowledge with the present learning event to facilitate a new language learning task” and this is supported by Hasırcıoğlu & (2024) and Jiamin (2024) who believe that language transfer is the effect of the crosslinguistic, language interference, the role of the mother tongue, native language influence, and language mixing. According to Corder (1971), he mentions that: "One explanation of”L2 errors” is that the students are carrying over the rules of their first language into the second language". Paudel (2024) points out that L1 interference may influence the learners at the levels of production and reception when the learners transfer the meaning as well as the forms of their native language. Therefore, it is logical to say that L1 might be the first starting stage of the L2, and the teacher can facilitate the rules for the students if the rules are similar. If the rules are different the teacher should discover how they are different (Umale, 2011). Moreover, transfer in language learning is divided into two types. The first type is the positive transfer which refers to language learning facilities. It usually happens if the two languages, the L1 and L2, have the same rules. To illustrate, Arab EFL students usually utilize the English article “the” perfectly because the both the Arabic and the English language have article "al" and "the" respectively. Another type of transfer is the negative transfer. This is when the rules of the mother tongue led to errors in the target language. For example, when Arab learners mention their name, they say “my name Ali” instead of “my name is Ali” because (verb to be) is not available in Arabic language. In terms of the contrastive approaches (CA), language transfer is shown as the main aspect that influences the second language of the students. This means that the common errors that are committed by the EFL learners are due to "the pull of the mother tongue." 3 TRANSFER OF TRAINING According to this strategy, how and what the students are taught is the main cause of the learners’ errors by applying the rules learned from their teachers or textbooks. To illustrate this point, some teachers try to teach the difference between the indefinite articles, "a" and "an" by teaching that “an “should be used with countable nouns that begin with vowels. As result, some students say “she is a university professor” which is known as an erroneous utterance. 4. L2 LEARNING STRATEGIES Learning strategies are known as instruments or tools that are important for delivering the lesson for the students. Chamot (1987) expresses the strategies as “techniques, approaches, or deliberate actions that students take in order to facilitate the learning and recall of both linguistic and content area information." Such strategies play a great role in enhancing the learning process, but sometimes they lead to some errors in learning L2. 5. COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES These strategies are one of the most common strategies that EFL students use in their learning process. They are typically used to identify some items that are important to know the meaning of. After that, they depend on such strategies to get their messages crossed. For instance, when a teacher attempts to define an “egg”, and the learners don’t know this exact lexical item, the learners may then use their hands to show the shape of it as a strategy to define it. 6. OVER GENERALIZATION OF TL RULES Over generalization has appeared as one of the most common phenomena in the learning process in both second and first language acquisition. It is often noticed in the field of teaching that learners anticipate more orderliness in the rules of the target language than exist. To illustrate this point, EFL students sometime utilize the past morpheme "-ed" with all English verbs. As a result, learners sometimes produce “* last week I “goed” to the market." or "* she “speaked” to her mother". According to Richards, reduction, redundancy, as well as simplifications are directly associated with overgeneralization (Richards, 1971). Taylor states that learners employ these strategies when they learn their second language in order to try to reduce the learning burden (Taylor, 1975). If we look deeply at such strategies, we can see that these strategies can make the learners' tasks easier. IJASOSInternational E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. XI, Issue 33, December 2025 http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 48 Many researchers have studied the specific variety of challenges that Arab EFL students face (Al-Mohanna, 2024). On the other hand, others have examined the syntactic errors which Arab EFL students (Nasser Alsager & Altamimi, 2024). The major purpose of this article is to better understand the various challenges that Omani EFL students face when they try to form questions. We expect Omani EFL learners to commit several errors while forming questions in the English language. Due to this, this paper will attempt to examine the carry-over of the structures of the synaptic from the first language to the second language by Omani learners. This will lead us to discuss the syntactic structure of the English and Arabic languages with respect to question formation. 7. QUESTION FORMATION IN ARABIC AND ENGLISH The errors that have been committed by Arab EFL learners have been investigated by many researchers, but my review of available literature found that there is not enough research on question formation. In fact, the difference in question formation in the English and Arabic languages is one of the biggest challenging that Arabic students face (Ahmed, (2023). 8. FORMING QUESTIONS IN ARABIC LANGUAGE According to (Umale, 2011), the Arabic language has two types of question: “istifham at-tahqiq” and “istifham at-taswur”. First of all, “istifham at-tahqiq” means Yes/No questions and these are formed with a “harf istifham” (an interrogative particle) that can be either “hal” or “a” attached to a declarative sentence. It is obvious from the examples below that such questions are formed without inversion or the auxiliary "do" as in English. To illustrate, these are some examples:  T'lamtm al alfransiah? (Learnedthey French). They learned french?  Hal T'lamtm al alfransiah? (Q word learnedthey French). Did they learn French?  A T'lamtm al alfransiah?( Q word learnedthey French). Did they learn French? The second type of question is “istifham at-taswur” an information question which is formed with the help of an “ism istifham” (interrogative pronoun) placed at the beginning of the questions such as “ma” (what), “maan” (who), “ayna” (where), “kayfa” (how), “limatha” (why), “mata” (when) and “ayyi” (which) (Faynan, 1999 and Umale, 2011). We can see from the example at the bottom that there is no auxiliary verb in Arabic questions. Unsurprising, Arabic students sometimes face difficulties in implanting the accurate auxiliary verb when they ask questions in English. Here are some examples:  Limatha taakhara al rajel? (Why late the man?) Why is the man late?  Maan ataa? ( Who came) Who did come?  Mata thahabta ila alhadeqah? (When went to the park?) When did you go to the park? 9. FORMING QUESTIONS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE According to (Greenbaum and Quirck, 1990), in the English language, Yes/No questions are formed by inverting subject and the auxiliary verb. Here are some examples to clarify this point:  She is a nurse. Is she a nurse?  They can study English. Can they study English? Moreover, they need "do, does or did" support when there is no auxiliary verb in the verb phrase (Leech and Svartvik, 1994).  He studies at Albrimi College. Does he study at Albrimi College?  They study English. Do they study English? English Wh-questions have Wh-words at the beginning of the questions such as what, where, when, why, how, who, which (Leech and Svartvik,1994).  He works in the hospital. Where do they work?  She was at university yesterday. Where was she yesterday? From what is outlined above, it can be seen that there are some clear differences between Arabic and English question formation. The major differences are that there is no change in the word order of Arabic questions and forms questions without adding any auxiliary verbs. IJASOSInternational E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. XI, Issue 33, December 2025 http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 49 10. THE THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF THE STUDY This research employs Communication Language Teaching (CLT) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) as the theoretical framework to solve the obstacles facing the learning and teaching of the Arabic language. As both frameworks are intended to encourage the context and real-life language with communicative acts, both are appropriate for Arabic instruction. Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is an effective theory in language education, emphasizing meaningful communication and real-world language use. TBLT focuses on learners completing tasks that mirror authentic language use, promoting both linguistic and communicative competence. Despite its popularity (Mudinillah, et al. 2024). Communication Language Teaching (CLT) gives much value to meaning since communication is the ultimate goal of second language acquisition. This approach is also referred to as the notional functional strategy (Qasserras, 2023). CLT and TBLT have a fundamental focus of motivation that their integration would successfully work for both contexts. Such frameworks stress more the exclusivity of the students with the increased enrolment level or participation of learners guaranteeing their engagement with language they meet out and in of classrooms they use daily. Figure 1.2 Theoretical framework based on The Communication Language Teaching (CLT) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) This framework is selected due to the fact that not only will pragmatics be allocated in a general way but also because it responds to the goal of this study: to focus on Arabic as a language and contribute to the effective use of language in communication. The two models are useful and suitable for Arabic, because of its language ‘specific difficulties and features than non-Arabic learners may meet. IJASOSInternational E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. XI, Issue 33, December 2025 http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 50 The Conceptual Framework As shown in Figure , the conceptual framework of the study is based on (Umale, 2011) and (Greenbaum and Quirck, 1990) who provided the forming of questions in both languages. This study provides a deep insight into the challenges facing by Omani leaners to create questions in English language. As has been mentioned above, the review of available literature found that there is not enough research on question formation. According to Ahmed (2023) difference in question formation in the English and Arabic languages is one of the biggest challenging that Arabic students face. Hope such study helps to provide useful solutions for all Arb learners. 10.1. Methodology This study adopts a mixed-methods research design in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of question formation errors among EFL learners at Sohar University. The quantitative component focuses on the systematic analysis of students’ written texts to identify the frequency and types of question formation errors, as well as patterns that may indicate first language (L1) interference. This approach allows for objective measurement and statistical description of error occurrence. To complement the quantitative findings, the study also employs a qualitative approach through semistructured interviews with EFL instructors at the university. These interviews aim to capture instructors’ professional perspectives on the causes of such errors, particularly the role of L1 influence, and to provide pedagogical insights that cannot be fully revealed through numerical data alone. By integrating both quantitative and qualitative methods, the study ensures a deeper and more nuanced understanding of question formation errors and their underlying linguistic and instructional factors. 10.2. Instruments In order to gain rich data, researchers should study their issues from several perspectives. In this research, two research tools have been used, which are quantitative and qualitative research methods plus data are employed. In this research the qualitative data (interviews) was conducted after the quantitative data was collected. For the purpose of obtaining data that explores teachers' and students' attitudes toward question formation in English and that identifies the most common grammatical errors in student’s questions, the researcher conducted this study in using the following tools for data collection: 1Samples: this study is based on 45 samples of Omani students’ questions. The purpose of collecting the samples was to examine the most common grammatical errors made by Omani students at Sohar University in Level 3. 2-The researcher structured interviews with 5 academic English teacher in GFP at Sohar University to obtain qualitative data regarding students' question formation. The aim behind this tool is to discover the real output and the students’ abilities to ask questions. IJASOSInternational E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. XI, Issue 33, December 2025 http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 51 10.3. Procedures Samples of written questions were collected from a mixture of 45 male and female Omani EFL students. They are in level three (intermediate) of the General Foundation program at Sohar University. The students were asked to translate variety of Arabic questions into English. Most of the students in this research had almost the same type of education before joining Sohar University where they studied English for 12 years at the school level. This means they have a similar pre-university and university background. Also, they have already finished level one and two before joining level 3. The data was collected at the beginning of the second semester in order to gain clearer picture of the grammatical competence of the learners. As a result, approximately 308 questions were examined for analysis. Five interviews have been conducted with academic teachers to obtain deeper understanding of the difficulties that students face in forming questions and the reason behind such difficulties. 11. DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 308 questions were used to enable researchers to answer the research questions. The students produced both WH-questions (220) as well as Yes /No questions (92). Such questions fall into two categories: The first one is grammatical questions which were well formed and included all the rules of Standard English grammar. Here are some examples: Where did you learn English? Where did you find this book from? The second type is the ungrammatical questions which aren’t appropriately formed and don’t follow the rules of the standard English grammar. Here are some examples: You can speak Arabic? Where does you learn English? This study will focus on the questions that do not follow the rules or usage of Standard English Grammar. 1How Common Are Question Formation Errors In Sohar University EFL Students? Two types of errors were identified by calculating the number as well as percentage of all types of questions. Table (1) shows all the results. Table1. Number and percentages of grammatical and ungrammatical questions Grammatical questions Percent Ungrammatical questions Percent 233 71.7% 92 28.3 The table shows that 28.3% of the questions created by Omani students in level three Sohar University have a variety of errors such as Auxiliary omission amongst others. 2What Types of Errors Do Students Make? This paper will attempt to analyze the ungrammatical questions which means we will look at 92 errors produced by Sohar University's students at level three. Such errors are divided into eight categories with an example for each one. Table2. Number of Errors according to the Different Categories Category Number of errors Example Auxiliary omission 36 Where you study English? Auxiliary replacement 23 Where are you live? Aux. Subject inversion 12 You can speak Arabic? Wrong question word 10 Who do you come to university? Verb inverted 5 What you name? Aux. redundant 4 Do you can speak Arabic? Aux. subject agreement 2 Where does you learn English? Total 92 100 IJASOSInternational E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. XI, Issue 33, December 2025 http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 52 Graph1: the percentage of each Category The graph as well as the table identifies all types of errors produced by the students. It shows which type received the highest rate of errors as well as which one has the lowest rate of errors. I have ordered them from the most to the least common errors. The examination of this table indicates that Auxiliary omission, Wrong question word, Aux. Subject inversion as well as Auxiliary replacement are the most common errors that EFL Omani students face. On the other hand, the least common errors are the Aux. subject agreement. 3. To What Extent Are Such Errors Likely To Be Caused By L1 Interference? Most of the errors produced by Omani students are divided into two problems which are lack of inversion and misuse of auxiliary verbs. To illustrate, here are some examples:  Where you study English?  How you came to the university?  You can speak Arabic?  From where you find this book? As mentioned earlier in this research, the biggest problem for Arabic students of English in the area of question formations is a lack of inversion and forming questions without adding the correct auxiliary verbs. It is noticeable that Arabic learners attempt to use Arabic structures while forming English questions. 12. DISCUSSION Based on these findings we can say that Omani students do commit errors in question formation while they study English as a foreign language and that they do this for many reasons. As mentioned in the literature review of this paper, Selinker(1974: 120) isolated five strategies which learners usually adopt while they learn a second language. The researcher would like to focus on only two of these categories of errors that relate to this paper's findings. The first process is the "language transfer" which leads to variety of errors produced by Omani students. Since many Omani students are still thinking in Arabic while they form questions in English, they tend to rely a great deal on transfer from their mother language. To illustrate this point, some of the ungrammatical questions have a lack of auxiliary verbs. For example, the students say "what your name" instead of “what is your name?". This error is made because the auxiliary verb doesn't exist in the Arabic question" math asmok". The second category error that we will look at is the overgeneralization TL rule and sematic feature. It is very clear from the findings that students IJASOSInternational E-Journal of Advances in Social Sciences, Vol. XI, Issue 33, December 2025 http://ijasos.ocerintjournals.org 53 overgeneralize some rules to form questions. For instance, one of the most common errors that Omani students face is "Auxiliary replacement". For example, instead of "where do you live" they usually produce "where are you live". To conclude, Omani students at Sohar University do commit many errors because of language transfer and overgeneralization. However, the biggest number of errors is caused by L1 influence in second language learning. 13. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION This research attempted to discover the major reasons behind the difficulties that Omani students at Sohar University face while producing questions in English. First of all, the result of the data collection shows that the most common types of errors produced by learners while trying to asking questions are in the area of Auxiliary omission and auxiliary replacement. The researcher then tried to figure out the possible reasons behind such errors and how the students utilize L1 to produce L2 in questions formation. The results of this study serve both teachers (particularly foreign teacher who are non-Arabic speaker) and students who learn English as a foreign language. If the teacher knows the types of common errors that Omani student makes and the reasons behind them, they will focus on these difficulties and use variety of techniques and strategies to help their students. On the students' side, they should be made aware of such errors and try to avoid them when they are learning a second language. Based on the paper's findings, teachers are highly recommended to read more about these problems in case studies, articles or books in order to expand their knowledge regarding the influence of L1 in learning and teaching a second language. In addition, attending conferences and workshops as part of professional development can play an essential role in helping teachers deal with these issues. 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