EFL teachers’ perceptions on the causes of students’ sentence errors

The aim of this qualitative case study was to explore the teachers’ perspectives toward the causes of EFL (English as a foreign language) students’ sentence errors. To collect data, the researchers utilized semi- structured interviews with six EFL teachers in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and the data were presented by including the excerpts of the participants’ responses to the interview questions. The findings revealed that the students’ sentence errors were made as a result of linguistic factors such as negative transfer, lack of vocabulary and lack of knowledge and non-linguistic factors, which are poor motivation, limited time to review the class material at home, excessive drill on simple sentence, and less attention to the teachers’ explanations in the classroom. It is suggested that teachers should overcome all of these causes by using various methods to help learners avoid sentence errors in the future.