The present study attempts to analyze the problems faced by undergraduate students in the
acquisition of English nouns. The Classification of English nouns is as diverse and varied as English
Grammar. The researcher in the present study examines how nouns are a source of confusion for
students of English as second language learners. This study investigates the errors and also
classifies the types of errors made by second language learners. A proficiency test was designed for
data collection. The data was collected from a sample of 136 undergraduate students studying in
5th, 6th and 7th semesters from English as well as other departments of Hazara University, Mansehra.
The results show that the grammatical category of gender was less problematic than number and
case. The undergraduate students faced problems in learning English nouns mainly due to the
students' lack of knowledge. The problem in the correct use of syntactic plural, gender pronoun and
the particular case of she, constant polarity tags, collective nouns, semantic anomaly, and
imperative, interrogative tags were most prominent in the data.
Key words: Nouns, Semantic anomaly, Syntactic plurality, Question tags, Grammatical categories.
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