Una ricerca sugli errori ortografici, morfosintattici e lessicali commessi in italiano da cento studenti maltesi

Abstract

This error analysis is an attempt at quantifying and illustrating the typology of errors committed by a hundred Maltese students in a hundred essays ·written under examination conditions at Ordinary Level Matric. This analysis could be interpreted on two planes. Primarily, I have endeavoured to explain the theoretical causes of the various types of errors; secondly, I have attempted to illustrate the nature of all the errors which I have come across in the essays by classifying them in tabular form in order to render my theoretical speculations and conclusions more lucid. This study has brought out an alarming multiplicity of orthographic, morpho syntactic and lexical deviances, which are mostly due to the fact that the students have not properly assimilated the grammatical rules of the Italian language. Furthermore one can safely conclude that the average Maltese student does not read enough in Italian. In view of this latter point, linguistic interferences from the mother tongue and the English language - which is our second language - often recur. This analysis has been compiled with the aim of helping all teachers of Italian understand better the nature of the deviances, to which Maltese students are prone, so that they could devise preventive measures and corrective exercises with the ultimate hope of ameliorating the results attained so far by Maltese students of Italian.