Sociolinguistic variables and error analysis: how do the first-year university students write

Abstract

In higher education, there is concern for the development of writing skills, a concern that was exacerbated in Chile when obtaining the results of the National Diagnostic Assessment of Initial Teacher Education applied to students of terminal levels of Pedagogy careers. This case study aims to identify the current status of the writing level of first-year Pedagogy students at a Chilean university and the dimensions that are necessary to strengthen the length of the training process. To do this, the results obtained by this group are compared with those obtained by the students of the same degree program at the National Diagnostic Assessment, through the method of error analysis and four factors that affect learning. The results indicated that the first-year students are in the lowest performance levels and the errors in their texts are concentrated in the structural and orthographic planes.