Errors in the Written Productions of Spanish Undergraduate Engineering Students: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Writing is a language skill that for most FL students is difficult to master. Therefore, students often find it difficult to write a specific composition which is not their FL. Especially for undergraduate technical students, this seems to be a challenging task since the presence of difficulties in any FL writing forces them to commit errors in their written productions. Therefore, what this chapter will identify is those errors made by engineering students in a public Spanish Polytechnic University over the last two years. The authors shall attempt to categorise errors based on their source following the comparative taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen. So, a total of 60 essays undertaken by these engineering students were selected taking into account their productions in the task assigned during the semester. The main objective is to prove that the results have undoubtedly demonstrated that the majority of errors committed by these engineering students can be classified as belonging to the interlingual category, being the category with the highest number of occurrences.