Pixel International Conferences

A number of studies have highlighted a widespread ‘writing emergency’ amongst Italian university students, who seem to show poor writing skills in their mother tongue (Sposetti & Piemontese 2017). Less attention has been paid to Italian (under)graduates’ performance in EFL writing (Pulcini & Campagna 2015), despite the fact that, given its role as the lingua franca of academia (Mauranen, Hynninen & Ranta 2016), English is increasingly being adopted worldwide as the medium of instruction (EMI) (Macaro 2018) in the process of internationalisation of higher education (Caleffi 2022). This study reports on the errors made by a sample of Italian university students when performing written assessment tasks in English. The study is based on a balanced corpus of 150 essays produced by Italian student teachers in the first and second years of a single-cycle degree in Primary Teacher Education. Firstly, the errors made by first-year and second-year students are classified separately according to the traditional linguistic category and surface strategy taxonomies (Dulay, Burt, Krashen 1982). Secondly, they are analysed, compared, and commented on, taking into account the impact that both the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and Internet-based communication are having on the very notion of ‘error’ (Newbold 2017). Finally, the paper discusses the implications, for English Language Teaching (ELT) practitioners, material developers and language testers, of a careful evaluation of students’ errors in the light of the occurring changes in the nature and role of English.

References:

[1] Caleffi, P.M. Does Writing (Still) Matter? Teaching English Writing in Italian Higher Education, Verona/Bolzano, QuiEdit, 2022.

[2] Dulay, H.; Burt, M. & Krashen, S. Language Two, New York/Oxford, OUP, 1982

[3] Macaro, E. English Medium Instruction, Oxford, OUP, 2018.

[4] Mauranen, A.; Hynninen, N. & Ranta, E. “English as the academic lingua franca”. In K. Hyland, and P. Shaw (eds), The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes, London/New York, Routledge, 2016, pp. 30-43.

[5] Pulcini, V. & Campagna, S. “Internationalisation and the EMI controversy in Italian higher education”. In S. Dimova; A.K. Hultgren & C. Jensen (eds), English-Medium Instruction in European Higher Education, Boston/Berlin, De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 65-88.

[6] Sposetti, P. & Piemontese, M. E. “Gli studenti universitari non sanno più scrivere? Una riflessione sulle caratteristiche delle scritture di un campione di studenti universitari italiani e sulle possibili strategie didattiche di intervento”, Studia de Cultura 9(3), 2017, pp. 144-157.

[7] Newbold, D. ‘Towards a (Painful?) Paradigm Shift: Language Teachers and the notion of “Error”’, Altre Modernità, 2017 (1), pp. 118-132.