Error treatment incidence on productive skills development of ecuadorian undergraduate english major students

Resumo

ABSTRACT The English Curriculum in the country of Ecuador has undergone major changes in the last decade, and national reports show a large gap in knowledge within the target language, evidencing a low level in both student and teacher productive skills in English. Hence, this study was conducted in order to measure the incidence of error treatment in the development of productive skills in pre-service English teachers with a pre-intermediate level in English. The subjects have a specific requirement for communicative competence as they will soon become role-models for language input and output in the classroom. Productive skills development was determined by analyzing the number of local and global errors made in the pretest and the posttest. This is a quantitative study that handled continuous data obtained during a specific academic period and determined using a cross-sectional method conducted in field research. It is also a quasi-experimental design as it consisted of both an experimental and a control group, totaling 54 participants. The pedagogical intervention applied to the experimental group lasted 16 weeks in regular English classes of six hours per week made up of two-hour sessions. Four techniques for writing and speaking error correction, two methods for writing error correction, and six strategies for speaking error correction were incorporated in the language instruction. The hypotheses testing was performed through the students’ T-Tests and the results from the experimental group showed significant differences between groups after the intervention regarding specific errors in their productive skills. The findings showed that the error treatment had incidence on the development of the writing and speaking skills of the experimental group. Keywords: error treatment, global errors, local errors, productive skills, communicative competence