Pronouns: Students’ Worst Enemy in the Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

In the Spanish-as-a-foreign-language class, there is a vast amount of classroom instruction (and textbook attention) dedicated to verbs, assuming that this is the most difficult issue for native English speakers to learn. A research study was carried out to confirm this common assumption. Error analysis was used and a lexico-grammatical taxonomy was created to count, identify, describe and classify the written errors found in ninety unaided compositions from 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-semester courses. Surprisingly, the category with the highest internal error rate in 2nd- and 4th-semester courses and the second highest in 3rdsemester courses was pronouns. A description of errors by type and their evolution from one semester to the next is included. An obvious cause for errors was found to be the interference of the L1. Pedagogical implications include the need to strengthen instruction of this apparently neglected category of pronouns at all levels of proficiency.

Keywords

• learner corpus
• taxonomy
• interlanguage
• error analysis
• corpus linguistics
• written error