A Comparison of Freshman and Sophomore EFL Students’ Written Performance through a Referential Writing Task.

In teaching writing to foreign or second language learners, one of the issues concerning teachers is the amount and types of errors students make in their writings. This paper aims to obtain a clear understanding of types of errors in the writings of Turkish EFL learners by comparing freshman and sophomore students' writing performance. To this encl research questions were formulated to see whether there is any significant difference between the participants' grade and their error types in writing. Data were collected through a picture story task consisting of six pictures. The statistical analyses revealed that a) there was not a statistically significant difference between grade groups on the number of t-units and proportion of words per t-unit they wrote in their picture stories, butb) there was a statistically significant difference between grade groups on the number of words they wrote and errors they made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]