A Comparative Analysis of Errors in the Written Productions of Spanish Undergraduate Engineering Students

Abstract

Writing is a language skill that for most FL students is quite difficult to master. Especially for undergraduate technical students, who have just finished their compulsory secondary education, this seems to be a challenging task since the presence of difficulties in any FL writing forces them to commit various errors in their written productions. Therefore, what this research paper tries to identify is those errors made by engineering students in a public Spanish Polytechnic University over the last two academic years. We shall attempt to categorise errors based on their source following the comparative taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt and Krashen. So, in order to conduct this research, a total of 60 essays undertaken by a number of engineering students were selected taking into account their written productions about alternative fuels in the task assigned during the semester. The main objective of this study is to prove that the results obtained from this analysis have undoubtedly demonstrated that, and here is where it lays the significance of this paper, the majority of errors committed by these engineering students can be classified as belonging to the interlingual category, being the category with the highest number of occurrences, unlike previous researches carried out beforehand. Keywords: analysis of errors, comparative taxonomy, engineering students, types of errors DOI: 10.7176/JEP/13-11-08 Publication date: April 30 th 2022