Which Grammatical Errors Do First-Year University Students Make and Do Those Errors Matter? A Focusing Inquiry

Abstract

Students in Health Sciences First Year (a gateway to health professional programmes) at the University of Otago sit an English diagnostic test before they begin their first semester. This test determines which students will need extra English tuition. We initiated a focusing inquiry with the 2014-2015 data from these tests to form relevant learning outcomes for students and to discover information that might be relevant to secondary schools throughout New Zealand. Our focusing inquiry revealed that many of our first-year students could benefit from further grammatical and test-taking tuition—not only because of linguistic and test-taking deficits, but also because the data demonstrate a relationship between successful placement in health professional programmes and grammatical competency. That is, our data show that students who make an error in any of the grammatical categories that we tested are less likely to get an offer of place in the Health Sciences professional programmes at the end of their first year.