Unresolved problems in the writing of chilean high school students: trends for improvement

Abstract

In the Chilean educational field, there is a research and educational gap in high school education around the delimitation of the real competencies and linguistic precision evidenced in the use of the written language. Writing review is a very arduous task for teachers, which involves a lot of work, with worrying difficulties and low levels of linguistic and discursive competence observed in students. The purpose of this article is to determine the most relevant problems in the writing of second-year high school students belonging to 4 municipal schools in the Biobío region. It is about answering the question: What are the most frequent errors observed in a corpus of high school learners?

The research is novel since it incorporates the Corpus Linguistics of Language Learners methodology and a technology-assisted error analysis for the identification of errors. Learner corpora are collections of oral texts or digital writings of language learners. These corpora are implemented and processed computationally through specialized programs for the recovery of information according to certain search criteria. The need to observe how students use the language can yield results that show which areas present greater difficulty, which are persistent, or which respond to different phenomena within the development of the language.

The study is mixed descriptive, quantitative and qualitative. The main objective is to determine the most frequent errors observed in a textual corpus of high school students of the educational system. The results show the following most relevant trends: (1) omission of the comma in sentences, (2) omission of the accent in agudas words, (3) in esdrújula words, (4) in the dieretic accent and (5) diacritic, (6) alternation of the graphemes s/c/z, (7) omission of capital letters, (8) substitution of additive connectors y (9) omission of the grapheme h. These trends serve as guidelines for teachers to develop writing proposals that support the improvement of errors in textual revisions and the linguistic precision of students.

The texts analyzed in our research also show different levels of difficulties that in some cases compromise the understanding of the text, such as, for example, what was found at the level of discursive cohesion. The most revealing thing in this study are the problems at the level of spelling and punctuation that could be expected to have already been resolved in the high school education. Orthographic knowledge influences textual construction processes in general, since attention is paid to the way a word is written.

The computational processing of large quantities of student texts to determine with certainty the reality they present at the level of their linguistic and textual competences is configured in a methodological advance at the level of the research that is being carried out around the detection of errors and problems in the educational system. This methodological approach constitutes a contribution to the educational and linguistic area, in that it allows diagnosing and assisting in the text revision tasks by high school teachers. This also provides possibilities for methodological improvements in a context where the detection of errors and the motivation for self-correction can be carried out privately and non-invasively.