error analysis of efl students’ oral productions in an online story telling course: the role of translation in focus

Much research has been done on analyzing efl learners’ errors in writing, but few studies have addressed the sources of students’ errors in oral production. this article aims to investigate the errors of advanced efl students in speaking in an online story telling course. to do so, the transcripts of 53 stories told by students in a synchronous class were analyzed with reference to the sources of errors including inter-lingual and intralingual ones. results indicated that with advanced efl students, intra-lingual errors outnumbered inter-lingual errors with the intra-lingual errors being mainly related to grammatical aspects of the language. however, inter-lingual errors occurred in relation to the use of lexical and grammatical collocations including preposition, verb, adjective and noun collocations. it means that in the use of collocations, learners generally adhered to literal translation from their mother tongue. the inconsistencies in the results of previous studies were then discussed with reference to the level of students and some pedagogical interventions needed to remediate students’ errors were presented.