International Journal of
English and Literature

  • Abbreviation: Int. J. English Lit.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 2141-2626
  • DOI: 10.5897/IJEL
  • Start Year: 2010
  • Published Articles: 281

Article in Press

Some Non-Standard English features in creative writing in English in Cameroon

BOUM YANNICK

  •  Received: 12 November 2015
  •  Accepted: 08 December 2015
This paper examines some Non-Standard English features (henceforth NSE features) in Creative Writing in English in Cameroon (henceforth CWEC). The data are three novels which are published by learned Anglophone users of English. These novels are selected for classroom teaching in English-medium schools in Cameroon. The narrow data consist of non-standard words, phrases, expressions and short passages which are extracted from a total of 105 000 running words. Using the Error Analysis (EA) frame, these NSE features were identified, classified, quantified and analysed and possible corrections were proposed. Of the 748 tokens identified, 474 (63.4%) are cases of grammatical errors, with preposition errors being the most widespread (155 cases), and 266 (35.5%) are cases of wrong lexical choice. A close look at these NSE features shows that they are unacceptable notwithstanding the fact they are widespread in the data

Keywords: Error Analysis, English features, standard, non-standard, creative writing