This paper discusses the need to apply a pedagogical model to the analysis of errors in the target language so as to make accessible to teachers a technique which they themselves can use in their own classrooms to extract objective information about their students’ errors. Such a model was applied to the written responses of 386 high school students in Jamaica to assess the levels of their difficulty with syntax as indicated by the proportions of error types derived from the tasks performed, and to determine the possible sources of the errors.