Grammatical Errors and the Realization of Ideational Meaning in EFL Students’ Spoken Descriptive Texts: A Transitivity Analysis

Abstract

Speaking with minimal preparation, semi-spontaneous rather than fully spontaneous speech, places significant mental pressure on EFL learners, often leading to grammatical errors as they transition between parts of their speech. Rather than viewing such errors solely as barriers to communication, this study examines how grammatical errors in oral descriptions relate to the conveyance of ideational meaning. Grounded in the theoretical principle of meaning recoverability, the construct “meaning resilience” is suggested in order to measure the degree to which the ideational configuration of a clause can still be recovered despite grammatical errors. The data was obtained from recorded spoken responses of six third-semester EFL students enrolled at Universitas Negeri Semarang through qualitative linguistic/discourse analysis enhanced with descriptive quantitative frequency analysis. The analysis was conducted based on error taxonomy by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982) in combination with Transitivity System proposed by Halliday & Matthiessen (2014) on 86 error-containing clauses out of 112 analyzable clauses from six participants. The results suggest that misformation was the dominant type of error (76.5% of error tokens) followed by omission (16.3%). Relational processes dominated error-containing clauses (51.8%), which was attributed to the generic structure of descriptive texts. Most importantly, 55.8% of error-containing clauses were classified as High Resilience, indicating that their transitivity structure remained analytically recoverable despite surface grammatical errors, an analytical interpretation rather than direct evidence of communicative success, while only 2.3% were classified as Low Resilience, where the ideational configuration could not be reconstructed even with reference to context. In this case, grammatical errors did not always prevent the recovery of the ideational meaning for these six students. These results suggest that a functional approach may be useful in assessing the spoken language since these students succeeded in conveying ideational meaning even if they made lexicogrammatical mistakes.