LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Errors Made by the Students of Engineering and Technology in Written English

R. Narayanan, Ph.D. Candidate
N. Rajasekaran Nair, Ph.D. and S. Iyappan, Ph.D.

‘FIRST I write one sentence: Then I write another. That’s how I write. And so I go on. But I have a feeling writing ought to be like running through a field.’ LYTTON STRACHEY

INTRODUCTION

The ability to write well is not a naturally acquired skill; it is usually learned or culturally transmitted as a set of practices in formal instructional settings or other environments. Writing skill must be gained and learned through experience. Writing also involves composing, which implies the ability either to tell or retell pieces of information in the form of narratives or description, or to transform information into new texts. It is undoubtedly the act of composing, though, which can create problems for students, especially for those writing in a second language (L2) in academic contexts.

Besides, formulating new ideas can be difficult because it involves transforming or reworking information, which is much more complex than writing as telling. By putting together concepts and solving problems, the writer engages in "a two-way interaction between continuously developing knowledge and continuously developing text" (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987, p. 12). Indeed, academic writing requires conscious effort and practice in composing, developing, and analyzing ideas. Compared to students writing in their native languages (L1), however, students writing in their L2 have to also acquire proficiency in the use of the language as well as writing strategies, techniques and skills. They might also have to deal with instructors and later, faculty members, who may or may not get beyond their language problems when evaluating their work. Although a certain amount of consciousness-raising on the part of the readers may be warranted, students want to write close to error-free texts and they enter language courses with the expectations of becoming more proficient writers in the L2 (Myles, 2002).

SAMPLES

For the selection of a corpus of language, following the guidelines offered by Ellis (1995, pp.51-52), a sample of written work collected from 408 engineering and technology students who have studying in first year engineering in various branches (EEE, ECE, Bio-med, Bio-Tech, CSE, IT, Auto-mobile & Mechanical) from four engineering colleges and one Deemed University in and around Chennai. However, there is a point that needs to be mentioned here, and it is the fact the informants speak first language at home with their parents and at college with their friends.

(a) Error identification

As a first step, the researcher developed, based on the literature (Corder, 1974; Richards, 1974; James 1998; Selinker, 1972 in Richards & Sampson,1974), a Taxonomy for Error Analysis including the following categories and sub-categories: grammatical (prepositions, articles, singular/plural, adjectives/adverbs, tense and subject-verb agreement), syntactic (coordination, sentence structure, nouns and pronouns), lexical (word choice), semantic & substance (mechanic : punctuation & capitalization , and spelling).

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