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

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ability to deal with language use; on the other hand, in reallife
activities students are not always expected to come across
texts whose contents are always familiar to them. The application
of texts which would deal
with. up-to-date and interesting subjects
might act as a motivating factor - for students are always
interested in getting new information from texts - and those
texts might also work as a possible means of verifying
students'
ability to deal with texts whose content, though belonging
to
students' major area of study, was not known by them. The actual
mastering of the subjects presented in each text by students
should be one aspect which would make the evaluation of their
linguistic performance rftore precise. Then, teachers might also
compare the results obtained from texts whose contents were
certainly familiar
to students with those from texts whose
contents were not certainly familiar
to them, so that the
synchronization of students' knowledge of the subject with their
linguistic performance might be better
evaluated.
At a practical level, teachers should rethink their
approach according to students' ability to read English texts.
Liisa Lautamatti 2 suggests that
"a reading course would be a general one,
offered to all students and based on the mother
tongue .. .
and she still states that
"if students are taught how to compensate for
their insufficient knowledge of the foreign
language by using all their previously acquired
knowledge relevant to the task, they will
develop not only the right kind of reading
strategies but strategies for learning from
written material, and a confident and independent