towards an analysis of errors made by university students ... - DSpace

oth groups was 60; these 60 students and the two seniors
worked
together, since they were all obliged to take the
English
Language I Course as one of their compulsory disciplines.
Students in both groups were about the same age
and
their social, cultural and economical background has not
»
constituted one of the important aspects
to be taken, into
consideration in our research; we have chosen these two groups
of students in accordance with the common process of enrolment
at the UFPB; this choice has, therefore, been a random
selection
as to students' social, cultural and economic background.
• The texts were distributed at the beginning
of the
class; then, after a short period of reading, either silent or
not, the students were asked to start-their translations;
the
use of a bilingual dictionary was permitted. To discover the
real difficulties which might appear in the texts to be
any type of comment, either on vocabulary or syntax, was
translated,
made
after all the students had finished their translations. However,
the usual procedure in this course is to read the text first,
make some general
comments on points which the teacher tfiinks are
difficult, and then the students do the exercises required and
the translation of the
text.
The translations.which constitute the corpus of this
research were rendered during the first semester of 19-79. The
presence of all the students in class was constant. The
ones
who dropped out totalled four, and they did so at the very
beginning
of the course. They rendered two translations, at most,
and these have not been included in the corpus to facilitate
the
statistics tests which would be used for the analysis of errors.