Tυπολογία λαθών σε γραπτά ακαδημαϊκού λόγου: η περίπτωση των συντακτικών λαθών

Abstract: The present study constitutes an attempt to document the most common errors made by students when preparing assignments for university courses. We have categorized these errors according to all levels of linguistic analysis, in order to help students avoid them in the future. The method adopted is that of error analysis, based on a corpus of our students’ assignments. The errors show the difficulties encountered by our students and the strategies they employed when making these errors. Our data were taken from assignments given to fourth-year students at the University of Thrace, Department of Primary Level Education. These students were native speakers of Greek, who were requested to fill tasksheets on various subjects of pedagogical-didactical content, each containing 800-1,000 words. Our corpus is not electronic. We detected errors in morphology (wrong declination of nouns/adjectives/verbs), syntax (incorrect punctuation, incomplete/long sentences, use of subordinate clauses instead of main clauses, incongruity of terms, wrong use of terms, mixing of the active and passive participles, etc.), and lexis (use of ‘is’/ ‘have’ constructions, and colloquial terms). In the present paper, we focus on syntactic issues, which seem to derive from the inadequate use of highly formal language, whose constraints and function are not internalized by our students, as well as the dominance of the spoken language in written texts. The results show that these syntactic errors have not been dealt with during the twelve years of primary and secondary education. Categorizing these errors will make our students more sensitive and aware of them in the future.