| Summary: | Students beginning a program of study at the university do not always have the expected mastery of written French, although this is an important factor of success. In order to support them, this article provides a description of the linguistic errors occurring in 591 texts written by 168 students who failed a French test at admission. The texts exhibit an average of 3.45 errors per 100 words, i.e. one error every 29 words (2 lines). The most frequent categories of errors are syntax (1.93 errors per 100 words), and grammatical spelling (0.65 errors per 100 words). Syntactic errors primarily fall under syntactic punctuation, and under construction of simple sentences (including the construction of verb phrases and noun phrases). The most frequent grammatical spelling errors fall under agreement in the noun phrase (in particular the number marking on the head noun) as well as agreement governed by the subject of the sentence, primarily verbal agreement. The article provides a list of the 20 most frequent errors, which include errors in the juxtaposition and coordination of phrases (rank 11th) and sentences (rank 15th). While the texts of students having French as a second language present an average of 4.48 errors per 100 words, the most frequent categories of errors remain essentially the same. The linguistic basis of frequent errors are the syntax of the sentence, nominal groups, juxtaposition, and coordination.
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