Ecuadorian public high school students’ errors in EFL writing skill

Abstract

The research topic of this study is Ecuadorian public high school students' errors in EFL writing skill. Its purpose is to know and examine the errors that EFL students commit when writing. The research process follows a design of mixed methods with an emphasis on description. The setting was a public high school located in Guayaquil. The participants were 90 students from the second year of senior high-school and five EFL teachers. The procedure involved the administration of an EFL writing test and questionnaires. The aspects considered for the quantitative analysis were the amount of errors, their frequency, and their respective percentages. For the qualitative analysis, the aspects considered were the characteristics of the grammatical, content, and mechanical errors. In both quantitative and qualitative analysis the answers provided by the participants, through the questionnaires, were also considered. The general conclusion of this study is that the most frequent error, combining the three variables taken into account, is the omission of transition words