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

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To apprehend the meaning is a.means of coming to
comprehension; we can only apprehend that which is connected
to what we know. The actual comprehension of a text requires
the ability to associate groups of words, grammatical structures,
ideas or facts implicit in what has been expressed.
Therefore,
if our students are not wel 1 -acquain.ted with certain types of
groups of words and the structural
elements which make up those
groups, comprehension cannot be
attained.
The fact that most of our students presumably
know
the subject being dealt with in a technical
text has proved to
be an insufficient factor to overcome
the linguistic difficulties
posed by their poor knowledge of English; however, as we have
mentioned before, in chapter '2, most students are aware of
their inability
to interpret what has been transmitted in those
English texts, because they are not able to decode some useful
grafic information available in those texts.
If we assume that there is motivation on the reader's
part, his ability to read depends to a great extent on an
efficient interaction between his linguistic knowledge and his
knowledge.of the world. If one of those types of knowledge is
poor, reading may be reduced just to the recognition of
the
letters, if they belong to the roman alphabetic script.
3.2. The psychological processes of receptive behaviour
Seeing reading as receptive performance Corder 22
lists some of the processes which theoretically aim at
comprehension. Firstly he states that recognition is the process
which