A Proposal for the Detection and Classification of Discourse Errors

Our interest lies in error from the point of view of language in context,therefore we will focus on errors produced at the discourse level. The main objective of this paper is to detect discourse competence errors and their implications through the analysis of a corpus of English written texts produced by Higher Education students with a B1 level (following the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). Further objectives are to propose categories which could help us to classify the different errors in the interlanguage of second language learners and to identify the causes of these errors in the different stages of second language learning in order to offer opportunities for improvement. The methodology followed is a mixed research method which includes quantitative and qualitative analyses of the corpus.