Error Analysis in Academic Writing. A Case Study of BA Students Enrolled in a Norwegian Didactics Course

This article investigates different types of language errors performed in a written summative exam by ten BA students enrolled in an elective Norwegian Didactics course in Romania. The corpus comprising the students’ exam papers was analysed qualitatively to identify various types of errors. The theoretical model suggested by Gass & Selinker (1994) was used to discuss issues of error analysis. A survey was then conducted to receive student feedback on the reported errors in the texts. Findings indicate that students make both inter-lingual and intra-lingual errors and that error analysis can be helpful when designing L2 Norwegian instructional materials.   Keywords: error analysis, foreign language teaching, language transfer, language distance, writing skills, Norwegian, Romanian. &nbsp