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

47
- similar task". 40
This transference, as Corder calls it, may cause the errors made
in the interpretation of English ngps; most of our students
continued to apply the mother-tongue rules where new ones were
needed. In translating EDUCATIONAL POLICY (TIC) two students
interpreted the exponent of h - POLICY - as being the exponent
of (q) in their translation. Thus, the English ngp
EDUCATIONAL
m
POL ICY became ' educação pol Tti ca ' , by one student, and .' educação
h h q h
pol i ci al ' by the other student.
On this account what" has to be
q
learned is what is different between
the mother tongue and the
foreign language. 41
After having pointed out the complex psychological
processes of receptive behaviour, we consider the
description
of
'reading comprehensi on' a task to be performed not only by
psychologists but also by experts in various fields of human
communication. Devising all the stages in the hierarchical
processes of receptive behaviour, Corder states that
"it is virtually impossible to decide whether
1 understanding' (and ideation) are specifically
linguistic processes or not... They have not
yet been even provisionally defined in any
psychological theory". 42 .
To sum up, reading comprehension does not belong
entirely to the field of applied linguistics, and more specifically
to language teaching. The foreign
language teacher's contribution
has been stated as
follows:
"he works on the principle that what they
(the
learners) want to say can be said in the