STUDENT-TEACHERS' ERRORS AND THEIR MESSAGE ADJUSTMENT

Abstract

This is a study carried out to investigate
the classroom English of prospective graduates ofBahir
Dar Teachers College. Eleven fourth year students
minoring in English went out to the Tana Haik Comprehensive Secondary School in Bahir Dar for teaching
practice. Seven of them were randomly taken and a
thirty-minute audio recording of each of their lesson was
made. This was transcribed into normal orthography
and the syntactic errors were listed down. The list gave
a total of 238 errors. Most of them fell into 9 classes.
A few were not that easy to classify and were put under
class 10. Theftrst three of these classes were (1) verbs,
(2) prepositions, and (3) articles. The employment of
one message adjustment strategy - paraphrasing - was
examined. Student-teachers made 83 attempts to
paraphrase sentences of which 78 led to syntactic
errors.