LINGUISTIC ACCURACY IN EFL WRITING: THE CASE OF SPANISH-CATALAN BILINGUAL LEARNERS

This study explores the features of linguistic accuracy in adolescent Spanish-Catalan bilingual learners’ writings in EFL. To this end, we have adopted a product-oriented perspective on writing, and have analysed learner errors in a total of 56 opinion essays from EFL students. Linguistic accuracy in students' texts was mainly conceptualized in terms of presence of learner errors, which were mainly analysed within the linguistic categories of morphology, lexis and syntax. The effect of two writing task variables, i.e., length and time constraints, was also considered. The results of the analysis show morphology as the linguistic category most affected by error on the whole, and within morphology, verbal tense and aspect appeared as most problematic, followed by articles and other determiners, noun endings and word order. Additionally, the percentage of error occurrence in shorter essays was higher than in longer essays, and time constraints were observed to have an influence in students’ linguistic accuracy, since learners were more linguistically accurate in home assignments than in classroom tasks. Error distribution was also different within morphology, lexis and syntax in both types of tasks.