Espinoza Flamenco, María Alicia and Merino Avalos, Dinora Cecilia and Polío Cabezas, Dalia Vitalina (2010) Main causes of grammar errors in the written discourse made by the students of fifth year of the B.A. in english: Emphasis in Teaching (year 2008-2009. Bachelor thesis, Universidad de El Salvador.

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Abstract

It seems to be part of every language learning process that learners make mistakes, and those who study English also face this situation. Mistakes are defined by different linguists; one of them was Chomsky (1967), who defined them as errors caused by factors such as fatigue and inattention, and he called them “performance factors”; S. P. Corder(1967) said that mistakes are deviations due to performance such as fatigue, excitement, lack of attention and/or carelessness; besides, in another source it is defined as “a wrong action attributable to bad judgement or ignorance or inattention”. They can be of different kinds such as pronunciation, spelling and of course grammar mistakes. However, it is necessary to establish the difference between mistakes and errors. Errors according to Krashen, Burt and Dulay (1982) are “those parts of conversation or composition that deviate from some selected norm of mature language performance”, Corder defined them as systematic deviations due to the learner’s still-developing knowledge of the L2 rule system. A way to improve or perform better in a foreign language is by studying grammar; it is important because grammar is an inherent part of every language. So, based on the importance of grammar in the learning of languages, in this case of English, this research is focused on the error analysis of the written discourse made by the students of fifth year and the students who have already taken all the courses of the B.A. in English: Emphasis in Teaching. The objective is to determine the different causes of errors made by the students. Although errors have been investigated in the past by some groups of undergraduate students of the Foreign Language Department of the University of El Salvador, those investigations have been focused on different aspects such as comparison between oral and written errors and phonological error analysis; besides, as their sample they had the four English Intensive courses and English Composition I. Based on the previous studies, it is essential to mention that this is not a new problem; however, it is necessary to study it from a different perspective in order to find out if the problem persists among students who have completed their course of studies and to find ways to correct it to get better results with the future professionals.

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