Ecuadorian public high school students´ errors in EFL writing skills

Abstract

The theme of this study is Ecuadorian public high school students´ errors in EFL writing skills, which purpose is to identify the types of writing errors made by the EFL learners, determine the most frequent error, and the causes that originate those errors. This study was done in the city of Cuenca, being the sample for the investigation 70 students and 5 teachers from second year senior public high schools. Moreover, the instruments used to collect the information were students and teachers questionnaires, and a writing test. The methods applied were quantitative and qualitative. The qualitative was used for the narrative data, while quantitative method was used for the numerical data to state the frequency and the recorded percentage of each error. The findings reveal that were found different types of errors related to the grammatical such as subject-verb agreement, verb omission, pluralization of adjectives; mechanical errors such as spelling mistakes and lack of punctuation; and content of errors which include omission of transition words, and incorrect organization of ideas in a paragraph.