A comparative error analysis in the written compositions of engineering students

Abstract

Needless to say, writing is a language skill that for most FL students is quite difficult to master. Especially for undergraduate technical engineering students, this seems to be a challenging task since the presence of difficulties in any FL writing task forces them to commit various errors in their written productions. Henceforth, we can assume that errors seem to be inevitable when writing in a foreign language. Although nowadays there is a clear tendency to consider these errors made by students in their process of language learning not as a negative aspect but rather as a natural step in the development of their language skills, in the past teachers contemplated the errors committed as something unfavourable, something to prevent from occurring at all costs. Nonetheless, in the last decades, taking into account the many scientific studies released, researchers have come to consider errors as the evidence for a creative process in language learning. The analysis of errors provides us with scientific evidence for the system of the language that students are using at a given time in the course of development of their studies. Consequently, the main objective of this paper will be to identify and classify the errors made by undergraduate engineering students in a public Spanish Polytechnic University over the last two academic courses. We will definitely try to categorise those errors taking into account their source but following one of the distinctive taxonomies proposed by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen in “Language Two” (1982): the comparative taxonomy. This comparative taxonomy of errors, upon which we will be basing ourselves on the present research, arranges errors into the following four categories: ambiguous errors, developmental errors, interlingual errors, and other errors (alphabetically arranged here). Therefore, what we shall be demonstrating along this paper is that, contrary to the opinion of previous studies and researchers, the most frequent category of errors, at least for these technical engineering students, is the category of interlingual errors. And to be able to lead this research, a corpus of a total of 52 essays was examined, comprising their written productions throughout the task that these students had to take on. It is also worthwhile mentioning that this number of essays does not correspond to an even number of students but, on the contrary, to an uneven one since not the same number of essays were handed in each year.