Abstract:

Nowadays, English language has become a vehicle to access any area of knowledge. Many Spanish schools are demanding teachers having a high level of command in that language. Therefore, pre-service Spanish universities are implementing English teaching within their educational policies and are starting to offer the possibility of studying some of their degrees and master courses in English. In this context, it seems important to study what kind of difficulties university students may find when they perform usual academic tasks in English as a foreign language. The present work aims at evaluating pre-service teachers’ problems when they are involved in usual writing academic tasks with different cognitive demands, such as writing a summary and an essay. Thirty-eight Spanish university students (aged 19-23) from a Pre-service Teacher Training Faculty participated in the study. English proficiency levels were evaluated and they ranged from A1-B1 according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). Participants were asked to write two tasks about two selected films: a summary, which implied ‘knowledge telling’; and an essay, which involved ‘knowledge transformation’. The two compositions were corrected using two standardised rubrics and students’ mistakes were classified and analysed accordingly. Results showed that students’ written productions had a high number of mistakes which affected their global quality. As expected, participants’ English proficiency correlated with the level of quality of their compositions. Students had serious difficulties in identifying genre demands and in organising their discourses. Nevertheless, they performed better in the low-cognitive demanding task (summary): they wrote a higher number of words and the written productions were of a higher quality than that of essays. Although some hypotheses are offered to explain these results, future studies should be performed to contrast them with different cognitive–demanding tasks.

Keywords:

Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Writing, Error analysis, Pre-service teachers.