Soumita Sarkar

In the unique residential setting of JNVs in Gujarat, English teachers and students often locate themselves on different linguistic pages. This study explores the ‘Error Gravity’ perceptions of PGT English teachers across nine JNVs, examining how they rank 13 types of morpho-syntactic and mechanical errors committed by Class XII students in their English essays. By evaluating these errors through the lenses of comprehensibility, frequency, and acceptability using a 5-point Likert scale, a clear ‘hierarchy of errors’ emerged. However, the data reveals a startling ‘gravity gap’ between what teachers prioritize and what students actually struggle with. While teachers remain focused on highlevel issues like tenses, subject-verb agreement, and word order, a student’s real challenge lies elsewhere. Rural ESL learners face significant foundational linguistic obstacles: spelling (driven by the phonological complexity of English); article usage (missing in many Indian languages); noun pluralization (educators often use the GTM to teach singular and plural nouns, but it inadequately prepares students to apply plural forms with appropriate determiners when writing about multiple subjects); and limited vocabulary arising from the tendency to memorize words in isolation, which is decontextualized and limits their capacity to use words correctly across different scenarios. These divergences suggest that our current teacher-centric assessment models often ignore the ‘interlanguage’ development of the individual learner. JNVs are a cultural melting pot; therefore, a rigid, ‘one-size-fits-all’ hierarchy fails to account for the diverse linguistic backgrounds of rural students. The paper argues for a paradigm shift: moving away from standardized checklists and toward individualized linguistic profiles. A learner-centred approach to EG, supported.

Within contemporary English Language Teaching, narrowing the divide between learners' first language and the target language is essential for fostering communicative competence beyond rote grammatical instruction. This study quantitatively investigates persistent grammatical error patterns in the essays written by rural ESL learners in Gujarat, India and proposes the Productive Failure–Error Analysis–Noticing (PEN) framework as a conceptual pedagogical model emerging from empirical evidence. Grounded in Interlanguage Theory and Error Analysis, the study analyses a corpus of 423 descriptive essays produced by Class XII students from nine Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas in Gujarat, India, with a stratified sample of 127 essays examined in detail. Seventeen categories of morpho-syntactic and orthographic errors were identified, with spelling, articles, noun usage, and lexical choice structures emerging as the most frequent domains. Statistical analyses reveal significant variations across gender and academic streams, indicating patterned interlanguage development influenced by interlingual, intralingual, and overgeneralization factors. Findings are systematically mapped onto the PEN framework, establishing a clear connection between empirical analysis and pedagogical intervention. Building on these findings, the study synthesizes insights from errorful learning and productive failure, operationalized through Written Corrective Feedback, and culminates in Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis as the key learning trigger. The resulting PEN framework offers a structured, feedback-driven model that reconceptualizes learner errors as productive resources for language development. The study contributes to SLA and ELT by advancing a theoretically integrated and pedagogically actionable model for rural ESL contexts.

<div><p><em>Corrective feedback (CF) is a vital aspect in the field of English language teaching, which is complex and continually evolving. English language teachers dedicate significant time and effort to provide feedback on students' writing performance. There is an ongoing debate regarding the efficacy of the teachers’ CF to improve the learners’ English writing competency. Empirical studies on CF in the Indian context are scarce. This study looks at how direct focused metalinguistic and non-metalinguistic written corrective feedback (WCF) affects the use of noun inflections in English descriptive essays written by Class XII students of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, Patan. The study involves two experimental groups and one control group of ten students each; the first group received metalinguistic WCF; the second received non-metalinguistic WCF; and the control group received no feedback. A pretest-treatment-post-test-delayed post-test format was utilized to extract the data. The findings suggest that the teacher's targeted direct metalinguistic WCF led to inconsistent improvements in the learners' written output. However, this approach has certain limitations, including issues related to time frame, scaffolding, personalized feedback, as well as sustained teacher’s monitoring, and other factors pertaining to learners’ proficiency, personality, retention, and revision.</em></p></div>

Of all the language skills, writing is the most difficult skill for the students who learn English as a second language because they have less experience with written expression. In this research paper, efforts have been made to prove the relevance of error analysis in the English writing skills of the Intermediate Level students. To conduct the research, a random written sample of a Class XII student of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, Navsari, Gujarat, has been taken up. Errors in the written text have been categorized using the theory provided by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982, pp.146). The need of this research arose after looking into the writing errors made by the JNV students of Intermediate Level, where English is taught and learned as a Second Language. The intent is to prove how error analysis can help to possibly identify sources of errors in learners’ writing; categorize the errors, and try to present a method for correction and improve the writing skills of the students. This study can be of great help to the English teachers of JNVs that were established in 1986 to bring out the best of Indian rural talent; to improve upon the writing skills of their students.