Making Sense of Errors Made by Analytical Chemistry Students in Their Writing

This paper investigates the influence of the writing errors made by first year Chemistry students at CPUT. The aim is to determine their pedagogic implications. Effectively, students writing in a second language at university exhibits linguistic errors which when properly defined and corrected can promote epistemological access to and mastery of disciplinary knowledge. Error Analysis provided theoretical and analytical framework for this study. Unlike classical Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA) analyses all sources of errors (Sanal, 2008). EA suggests that the learners’ learning strategies are the main causes of errors. These errors are: ‘transfer’, ‘overgeneralisation’, ‘simplification’, ‘avoidance’ and ‘overproduction’ (Zhuang, 2011). This qualitative study examined and analysed a corpus of Chemistry 1 students’ essays. It was found that mother tongue interference, syntactic and morphological errors, misapplication of essay construction rules, punctuation and spelling errors compromise the quality, meaning and rhetoricality. Essentially, the results provided feedback to the lecturers regarding the nature of students’ writing errors and how have the students progressed toward the acquisition of academic language. Therefore, the study establishes the need for a tailored academic literacy intervention to promote academic language proficiency in the Chemistry discipline.