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

INTRODUCTION
Since 1970 the Federal University of Paraíba has been
offering English courses for non-humanities students. The
inclusion of these courses in other academic fields of studies,
besides
the ones offered to Letras students, was due to the
urgent needs imposed by the number of foreign
textbooks,
periodicals, and reference books to be consulted by
undergraduate
students.
The teachers
in charge of this new aspect of the
teaching of English, in this case as an auxiliary subject
to
other disciplines, have been facing some difficulties
in the
preparation of a syllabus whose basic condition might meet the
students' needs. These courses are nowadays called English
Language I, and aim at an efficient and objective performance
on the students' part so that their studies and research can be
carried out
successfully.
The aim of this work is to test the hypothesis
that
undergraduate students at the Federal University of Paraíba have
difficulty with English nominal groups which, in turn, interfere
with comprehension of written texts. Nominal groups is a term
employed by the Systemic linguistis, notably M.A.K. Halliday and
J.McH. Sinclair whose terminology and system.of grammatical
analysis will be briefly summarized in the next chapter. This
type of difficulty was detected when students were asked to
translate texts from English into Portuguese.
It should be
emphasized that we are aware that our students are not
trained
to be professional translators; they are required to translate,
or to interpret the text to be studied in class, so that the