Analysis of students' syntactic errors in Spanish: A pedagogical orientation

Abstract

This paper discusses the need to apply a pedagogical model to the analysis of errors in the target language, so as to make accessible to teachers a technique that they themselves can use in their own classrooms to extract objective information about their students' errors. Such a model was applied to the written responses of 386 high school students in Jamaica to assess the levels of their difficulty with syntax, as indicated by the proportions of error types derived from the tasks performed, and to determine the possible sources of the errors