Analysis of the written interlanguage of intermediate level students of Spanish as a foreign language

This article reports an exploratory case study with a mixed approach that seeks to contribute to the reflection on the didactic and curricular implications that the demographic profile of students and their perceptions may have in their linguistic performance in a Spanish-language school located in San Carlos, Antioquia, Colombia. For this purpose, the written interlanguage of a group of 21 intermediate students was characterized using the methodology of error analysis. The results from marking the errors were contrasted with demographic and perception information about learning. These data were collected by means of a survey. During the analysis, carried out by means of an error typology grid, it was found that there was an average number of errors of 50.28 out of an average of 538.9 words, and several coincidences in local, omission, intralinguistic, and spelling errors. The data confirm what has already been discussed in the literature about the difficulties that students have with the verb and about how linguistic interference fails to explain two thirds of the errors.