Analysis of Errors in the Written Essays of Engineering Students: Using a Comparative Taxonomy

Isabel María García (Centro Universitario de la Defensa de San Javier, Spain)
Copyright: © 2023 |Pages: 25
EISBN13: 9798369312230|DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-6222-5.ch001
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Abstract

There is a clear tendency to consider the errors made by learners in their process of language learning not as a negative aspect but as a natural step in the development of their language skills. In recent decades, researchers have considered errors as the evidence for a creative process in language learning. Therefore, the main objective of this chapter will be to classify the errors made by undergraduate engineering students in a public Spanish Polytechnic University over the last two courses. The authors categorise those errors following the comparative taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen in “Language Two” (1982). This taxonomy arranges errors into the following categories: interlingual, developmental, ambiguous, and other errors. Consequently, this chapter demonstrates that the most frequent category of errors is the interlingual category. And in order to lead this research, a corpus of a total of 72 essays was examined, comprising their written productions in the task assigned throughout these last two years.
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