Analysis of written and oral errors in the english -as-a-foreign-language classroom

Abstract

This study lies within the area of Second Language Acquisition and Error Analysis by analysing the oral and written errors that 1ESO students –whose L1 is either Catalan or Spanish - make in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. The purpose of this study is to analyse what type of written and oral errors students of this level make and, afterwards, classify these errors into transfer or developmental errors in order to find out to what extent the L1 influences the students’ production. In the present study, written data were obtained from some compositions that students were asked to write and oral data were collected by observing the students’ oral production in the English lessons during my first internship period. Results showed that the most common type of error concerns grammatical errors both in written and oral production. In the same way, at the level of 1ESO students, developmental errors are more common than transfer errors. The study thus shows that the vast majority of errors are developmental errors because students of this level are still learning new structures, and they are, hence, speculating about the use of these structures. Due to this fact, most of the errors that students make concern grammatical errors.