Spanish pre-university students' use of English: CEA results from the University Entrance Examination

Authors

  • María Belén Díez Bedmar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2011/2/149681
Keywords: English exam, University Entrance Examination, Computer-aided Error Analysis

Abstract

In this paper an updated overview of the main errors that Spanish students make when writing the English exam in the University Entrance Examination is provided. To do so, a Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA) (Dagneaux, Denness & Granger, 1998) was conducted on a representative sample of the students who took the exam in June 2008 in Jaén, and wrote a composition on the same topic. The use of the most widely-used error taxonomy, the Error Tagging Manual version 1.1. (Dagneaux, Denness, Granger & Meunier, 1996), and the analysis of the results by means of descriptive statistics foster the possibility to replicate this study and move forward in the description of the students’ written command in the foreign language at this stage. The comparison of the findings obtained in this study and those from previous (C)EAs on the English exam reveals that some common tendencies may be shown.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

María Belén Díez Bedmar

holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Jaén, where she is an Assistant Professor. Her research interests include the exploitation of learner corpora, language testing, the acquisition of English as a foreign language, computer mediated communication, clinical linguistics and intercultural pragmatics. She has enjoyed research stays in various international institutions, and she co-edited the book 'Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research' (Rodopi, 2008). She is currently involved in corpus-based international projects such as ICCI (TUFS), or the CLAN corpus.
Published
01-12-2011
How to Cite
Díez Bedmar, M. B. (2011). Spanish pre-university students’ use of English: CEA results from the University Entrance Examination. International Journal of English Studies, 11(2), 141–158. https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2011/2/149681
Issue
Vol. 11 No. 2 (2011): New Developments in Corpus Linguistics
Section
Articles

The works published in this journal are subject to the following terms:

1. The Publications Services at the University of Murcia (the publisher) retains the property rights (copyright) of published works, and encourages and enables the reuse of the same under the license specified in item 2.

2. The works are published in the electronic edition of the magazine under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0.

Licencia Creative Commons

 

3.Conditions of self-archiving. Authors are encouraged to disseminate pre-print (draft papers prior to being assessed) and/or post-print versions (those reviewed and accepted for publication) of their papers before publication, because it encourages distribution earlier and thus leads to a possible increase in citations and circulation among the academic community.

RoMEO color: green

 
SUMMARY IN SPANISH
La Universidad de Murcia se reserva los derechos de copyright del material publicado en esta revista bajo la licencia Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0., aplicable tanto para la reproducción como la reutilización de los materiales contenidos en ella.