A pragmatic analysis of errors in University students' writings in English

Abstract

The Communicative Approach, mainstream method in the teaching of foreign languages in the past forty years, is recommended by the Council of Europe by means of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CE 2001: 1): “It describes in a comprehensive way what language learners have to learn to do in order to use a language for communication and what knowledge and skills they have to develop”. As a result, language teaching is understood as the teaching of language as communication, based on three pillars; linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence and pragmatic competence. Depending on their level of proficiency, students are expected to have developed their pragmatic competence through their learning process. This paper analyses the types of pragmatic errors students incur on when they write in English as a second language at Higher Education Level in order to determine if pragmatic competence develops at the same pace as second language learning.