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

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well-formed according to the rules of the language, understanding
also involves the perception of the function of the utterance in
its context; it
involves
" 'understanding' the situation as well, and
this relates the understanding of language
tó an understanding of the world". 35
It is in the psychological processes of identification
that we might tackle a probable cause of our students' errors
in
their interpretation of English ngps, for it is connected
"With gramatical/semantic competence, formation
rules and acceptability".
Since understanding presupposes identification, the former cannot
be attained if there is some sort of blockage along the scale of
psychological processes of receptive behaviour. On the other
hand, it is our students' understanding of the situation that
makes most of them conscious of the errors that they have made
in contexts which are familiar to
them.
We might assume that they nave failed in internalizing
some 'rules' related to the formation of English ngps at the
stage of the process of identification in their receptive
foreign language
performance. This failure might be due to
their mother-tongue interference concerning, in this particular
case, the order of the structural elements of English ngps,
since in Portuguese, the sequence of those elements usually
follows a different order or
arrangement.
"The assumption, then, is that some of the
rules they already know are also used in the
production and understanding of the second
language. This is what is meant by 'transfer 1 ;
learners transfer what they already know about
performing one task to performing another or