Mid Sweden University

Knowledge of grammatical rules, of how sentences are structured, in a second language is important for anyone who wants to be made understood in speech and writing. The aim of the present study is twofold. Firstly, to investigate and determine the frequency and distribution of grammatical errors made by Swedish junior high school students in Sweden by analyzing student essays written for, and gathered in, the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC). The second aim is to determine if there are any differences in the amount and distribution of errors between the genders. The results of the present study indicate that more than half the errors made, by ninth grade students as a whole, are related to verbs, prepositions and subject-verb agreements. Additionally, there was no notable difference in the amount of errors produced by either gender. There was, however, a difference in the distribution of said errors in the nine error type categories.