The most frequent errors made by university students in writing- such as, the low abilities of the students in understanding and using syntactical rules properly which was reflected in the enormous number of grammatical errors made by the students in the test. With this in mind, the negative transfer from the mother tongue language is one of the major causes of most of the syntactical errors made by the students in the written text. Compendiously, Wrong tense errors, prepositions, articles errors were found to be the most frequent ones.
Initially, students learn English in their native country where English is not the medium of communication. Apparently, English is not used in this society except in a few businesses or organizations. And, students learn English inside the classroom where the English Language teachers are native speakers of their mother tongue. No one can deny that it is no game to see the students are not motivated to learn English because they do not see the need for learning it; heuristically, they want to learn a language which will guide them to have a better future. Moreover, Students' opportunity to learn English in a natural atmosphere through direct interaction with native English speakers, is very limited. In the same line with this, in order to learn a particular language, the learners need to have an environment where they can learn and grow.
It is necessary to grasp an essential point which is writing as one of the basic skill that students must develop. As it is clearly known, writing is a complex skill and even per se considered by many linguists as the most difficult of all the four skills, writing, speaking, listening and writing. Obviously, writing is a real problem for most EFL learners, and they need to read more in order to develop their writing skills. The source of difficulty arises from the fact that non-native speakers think in their own native language when they write in English. Authentically, learners must acquire proper use of grammatical rules and structures since good knowledge of grammar is one of the basic requirements of effective writing. Additionally, the low performance of the students in the writing test revealed that they lack the ability of understanding and use syntactical rules properly.
Based on this premises, it could be concluded that the negative transfer from the mother tongue was found to be one of the main causes of syntactical errors made by the students in their written texts. Viewed in this way, students need to be encouraged to look critically and analytically at their written texts and try to find out the grammatical errors by themselves and correct them.
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