An inquiry into grammatical errors in writing committed by high achieving EFL students

Numerous research studies have investigated grammatical errors in writing committed by EFL students across the globe. There is still a dearth of research that focused on high achieving students in the context of EFL learning in Indonesia. The aim of this study was to find out the dominant errors made by the student of kelas akselerasi (or ‘class for high achieving’ students in the Indonesian school system) and to account for the causes of their errors. The data were taken from the students’ essays in one of the well-known high schools in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The Error Analysis procedures were used to analyze the grammatical errors in their essays. The errors were classified into omission, addition, misformation, and misordering categories, which are based on the surface strategy taxonomy. The findings showed that the most dominant errors committed by the students were of the omission type (61.04%), followed by misformation (18.78%), addition (16.85%), and misordering (3.31%). The causes of these errors were mostly due to intralanguage factors rather than interlingual factors. It was concluded that the students in this class, although identified as high achieving students, still faced problems in using the correct grammar in their writing.