Abstract
There has been a lot of interest in the study of police language, particularly in relation to warnings, suspect interrogation, and courtroom interpretation. This research, however, focuses on the common linguistic errors in police handwritten statements. The relevant research questions for the current investigation are based on a larger study of professional writing and are as follows: (a) What are the most common grammatical errors made by non-native English-speaking police constables in their statements?; (b) How can errors made by non-native English-speaking police constables in written statements be classified?; (c) How many times does each type of error occur in non-native English-speaking police constables’ statements?; (d) What are the possible sources of grammatical errors in non-native English-speaking police constables’ statements?; and (e) What potential measures could allow non-native English-speaking police constables to present clear and accurate statements? A qualitative approach was adopted, applying a descriptive design to investigate the phenomena under investigation. Two sets of data were examined, namely observation and documentation. In fulfilling this research, a total of (N=65) respondents were sought. That is, (n=20) male and female police constables were purposefully sampled for observation. In the second data set, (n=45) handwritten statements on common assault, intimidation, and crimen injuria were also selected. In the analysis, observational data were analysed using an Interactive Analysis technique as an analytical tool. For the examination of a corpus of handwritten statements, Error Analysis was also applied as a framework for data analysis. The results of the study have shown that even after completing a two-year integrated learning programme, police officers still struggle to write statements that are devoid of errors. The observational data indicated that the following factors may have attributed to errors: the officers’ inadequate knowledge of the English language, the lack of translation competence, inattentive writing, poor pronunciation, the officers’ lack of readiness to learn and use English, the overgeneralisation of English grammar rules, the lack of writing skills, and the inability to establish sense-relation in writing. In the (n=45) handwritten statements examined, 2 545 factual errors were identified. It was found that 1 238 of these errors were associated with poor capitalisation, 362 with spelling errors, 205 with punctuation errors, and 144 with sentence form errors. The moderate errors included 141 verb errors, 133 tense issues, 96 pronoun errors, 82 article errors and 71 preposition errors. The lowest error rates were found in discourse errors 48 and subject-verb agreement errors 25. The results of the study have demonstrated that these errors can make it difficult to understand the text and might even obscure what actually happened during the incidence of crime. Based on the findings, recommendations and implications for police trainers and constables, as well as the department, are provided. Lastly, it is hoped that the results of this research will assist police officers within the police Service in improving their English writing skills so that they can produce correct and understandable writing.
Key words: academic writing; acquisition; corpus; discourse; grammar; interference; lexical; linguistic proficiency; morphology; police written language; prestigious language; semantics; speech community; speech production; syntactic; transference.