Analysis of Errors in Written Production of Students of Italian as a Foreign Language in the University Context

Abstract

The paper begins with a presentation of a theoretical framework and also includes an overview of the treatment of learners errors within different approaches of Second Language Acquisition. Also, the types of errors, the criteria for their identification and, finally, their causes, are discussed. The second part deals with a corpus consisting of the learners’ written products, in which the most frequent errors are described and explained (the learners are students of the BA course in Italian at the Faculty of Arts of Ljubljana). The author believes that in order to achieve high levels of competence in foreign language, it is necessary for the students to become aware of their errors and to reflect on them with the help of the teacher, who should be familiar with the types of errors the students are like to make. The purpose of the analysis was to find out the most frequent errors and to identify and describe their causes. Although it was not possible to determine the causes of all the students’ errors, three main sources of the most common errors were identified: a. the students’ L1, b. the characteristics of the language which is being learned, c. other foreign languages the student is learning or already knows. Although the corpus consists of a relatively high number of written assignments, it appeared too small to allow a reliable analysis of some types of errors to be carried out, particularly those related to the use of verb forms.