Learner Corpus Research Articles

Verb conjugation errors by learners of Korean

Abstract This study aims to identify patterns of verb conjugation errors that learners of Korean manifest and the factors that influence these errors through an analysis of an error-annotated learner corpus. For this purpose, a paradigmatic relations-based description of language acquisition was proposed. The predictability of each conjugation class was estimated by way of entropy, a tool for measuring predictability. Using entropy allowed us to compare the regularity of each class in detail. The results showed that there are 332 verb conjugation errors that can be classified into three types of errors: errors with vowel endings, errors with lower entropy, and errors with higher entropy. The frequency of the first two types suggests that learners make errors when producing frequently used conjugated forms and with more predictable classes. Considering this study’s reproducibility and the reliability of its procedures and the results, its findings are expected to make a substantial contribution to the study of error analysis using error-annotated learner corpora.

How to use oral multimodal corpora and data-driven learning to teach French Talk-in-Interaction

Abstract This paper presents one aspect of our ongoing research in the context of a doctoral thesis. We focus on the use of multimodal oral corpora to develop the interactional skills of learners of French as a foreign language (André 2018, Ravazzolo and Etienne 2019). To do so, we compiled a list of interactional difficulties through a survey of 20 researchers and French as a Foreign Language teachers. After that, we created a learner corpus to check whether the difficulties brought up in the survey were present in learners’ productions, and to narrow down our results. To better analyze this corpus, we conducted self-confrontations so that we could have input directly from the learners. The objective was to identify interactional difficulties that could be the object of data-driven learning (Johns 1991) sessions with intermediate-level learners of French as a Foreign Language. The paper is part of the AILA Europe special issue.

They just don’t get it! Towards informing course and syllabus design – an error analysis of referencing in undergraduate writing

For students to formulate a well-supported academic argument, proper source integration skills need to be applied. This depends on a student’s ability to quote or paraphrase sources and adhere to referencing styles’ technical requirements. Academic writing teachers need to investigate which aspects of source integration students fail to master. By utilising the multilevel, multi-genre, multi-language learner corpus of South African languages for academic purposes compiled on behalf of the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), we performed an error analysis of typical referencing errors and the frequency of specific kinds of referencing errors in the academic writing of first-year students. This error analysis enabled us to move beyond “having an idea of what errors they make”, to an in-depth investigation of recurring errors, in order to be able to offer focused academic writing support. Findings include, firstly, consistently recurring technical errors with citation format. Secondly, students struggle with formatting reference lists as per the required referencing style. With this paper, we wish to initiate a discussion on the importance of teaching the mechanics of referencing and other pedagogical inferences to inform course and syllabus design, focused on source integration.

Effects of proficiency and gender on learners’ use of the pragmatic marker 吧ba

The Chinese particle吧ba has not received much attention in pragmatic studies, particularly in learners’ uses. However, L2 pragmatic investigation will contribute to the literature of 吧ba and, more generally, Chinese linguistic studies on particles. Therefore, this study investigates the pragmatic marker 吧ba employed by L2 learners of Chinese using data collected from a Chinese learner corpus. The effects of proficiency level and gender were both explored. The findings indicated that proficiency affected learners’ uses differently across the four illocutionary types of 吧ba. Learners across the three proficiency levels in the corpus showed more similarities concerning the directive and interrogative usages of the marker but more differences regarding the assertive and topic-introducing usages. Male learners were found to employ 吧ba more frequently than female learners across the illocutionary types of assertive, directive, and interrogative. The L2 pragmatic study of 吧ba adds to previous Chinese linguistic research on this particle and contributes to theoretical debates over Chinese pragmatic markers. Implications for corpus pragmatic studies are also discussed.

Using Learner Corpora in Serious Game Design for English Phonology and Pronunciation Teaching

Using Learner Corpora in Serious Game Design for English Phonology and Pronunciation Teaching

A comparative study of lexical richness in English writing by Chinese senior high school students

ABSTRACT This corpus-based study investigates lexical richness in English writing by Chinese senior high school students. Lexical uses in 303 compositions were compared across three grades in terms of lexical sophistication, variation, density and errors. Timed compositions were sampled from Writing Corpus of English Learners, and the sample sizes of three grades remained almost the same. The data were analysed through Range and Lexical Complexity Analyser to compute the four measures. In general, it is found that these students used a limited range of vocabulary and committed a number of lexical errors. In particular, one-way ANOVAs, Kruskal-Wallis tests, and post-hoc analyses showed that the growth of sophisticated word ratio accelerated in the first two years but decelerated in the third year. Lexical variation gained a significant increase across grade levels. Lexical word ratio decreased remarkably but increased slightly during the three-year learning. There were non-significant decreases in lexical errors between adjacent grade levels. These lexical features can be largely attributed to students’ insufficient mastery of cohesive devices, improper English instruction in classes and pressure of the National College Entrance Examination. Based on these findings, we provide suggestions for foreign language teaching in senior high schools in China and other educational contexts.

Neural automated writing evaluation for Korean L2 writing

AbstractAlthough Korean language education is experiencing rapid growth in recent years and several studies have investigated automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems, AWE for Korean L2 writing still remains unexplored. Therefore, this study aims to develop and validate a state-of-the-art neural model AWE system which can be widely used for Korean language teaching and learning. Based on a Korean learner corpus, the proposed AWE is developed using natural language processing techniques such as part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, and statistical language modeling to engineer linguistic features and a pre-trained neural language model. This study attempted to determine how neural network models use different linguistic features to improve AWE performance. Experimental results of the proposed AWE tool showed that the neural AWE system achieves high reliability for unseen test data from the corpus, which implies metrics used in the AWE system can help differentiate different proficiency levels and predict holistic scores. Furthermore, the results confirmed that the proposed linguistic features–syntactic complexity, quantitative complexity, and fluency–offer benefits that complement neural automated writing evaluation.

Designing, compiling and interrogating corpora in L2 Spanish acquisition research

ABSTRACT Despite the burgeoning field of Spanish second language acquisition (SLA) research, large Spanish learner corpora (LC) are not common practice yet. We present a general yet practical introduction to the multiple decisions Spanish as a second language (L2) researchers should consider before creating their own LC. We focus on (i) two freely available Spanish LC (CEDEL2 and COWS-L2H), (ii) their general design principles, (iii) crucial variables to collect (learner and task variables), (iv) ways of collecting and compiling LC data, and (v) the final product (the corpus interface). We explore different ways of interrogating the two corpora, illustrating them with specific (morpho)syntactic and lexical examples from L2 Spanish, as well as potential curricular and teaching applications of LC. We conclude with a recommendation for the triangulation of LC data with experimental research and a summary of future directions that the field of LC research may take. Our ultimate aim is to equip researchers with the basic theoretical and methodological tools to design, build and collect their own LC.

Development of grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatics in an additional language: insights from Spanish learner corpus research

ABSTRACT The current article offers an overview of scholarship on additional-language (e.g., second-language, heritage-language) users of Spanish that has been carried out using learner corpora in the last decade. I focus the review of Spanish learner corpus research on investigations that have examined grammar (e.g., fluency, grammatical gender), vocabulary (e.g., lexical diversity), and pragmatics (e.g., discourse markers), and I highlight the contributions that this body of work has made to the understanding of the use and development of additional-language Spanish. I also discuss the pedagogical applications that this line of inquiry may have. I conclude by identifying specific avenues for future work pertaining to research on additional-language learning and the development of new corpora.

VALICO-UD: Treebanking an Italian Learner Corpus in Universal Dependencies

This article describes an ongoing project for the development of a novel Italian treebank in Universal Dependencies format: VALICO-UD. It consists of texts written by Italian L2 learners of different mother tongues (German, French, Spanish and English) drawn from VALICO, an Italian learner corpus elicited by comic strips. Aiming at building a parallel treebank currently missing for Italian L2, comparable with those exploited in Natural Language Processing tasks, we associated each learner sentence with a target hypothesis (i.e. a corrected version of the learner sentence written by an Italian native speaker), which is in turn annotated in Universal Dependencies. The treebank VALICO-UD is composed of 237 texts written by non-native speakers of Italian (2,234 sentences) and the related target hypotheses, all automatically annotated using UDPipe. A portion of this resource (36 texts corresponding to 398 learner sentences and related target hypotheses)—firstly released on May 2021 in the Universal Dependencies repository—is associated with error annotation and the automatic output is fully manually checked. In this article, we focus especially on the challenges addressed in treebanking a resource composed of learner texts. In addition, we report on a preliminary data exploration that makes use of three quantitative measures for assessing the quality of the data and for better understanding the role that this resource can play in tasks lying at the intersection of Computational Linguistics and learner corpus studies.

Learner Corpus Research Meets Chinese as a Second Language Acquisition: Achievements and Challenges

The article sheds light on Chinese as a Second Language Learner Corpus Research, emphasising advances and lacks in this field. First, the paper describes the potential of learner corpora in the investigation of learner language. Second, it provides an overview of Chinese learner corpus-based research and reviews existing L2 Chinese learner corpora. The paper highlights the lack of L2 Chinese learner corpora collecting data from Italian learners. Therefore, it emphasises the importance of compiling corpora to conduct studies on the acquisition of L2 Chinese by learners whose L1s are other than English or Asian languages.

The instrumental case in Russian written texts of Kazakh students: evidence from the Russian learner corpus

The instrumental case in Russian written texts of Kazakh students: evidence from the Russian learner corpus

A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF BE-COPULA IN NATIVE SPEAKER AND NON-NATIVE SPEAKER LEARNERS’ ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS

Background and Purpose: There is little research on the use of BE-copula in learner compositions in terms of how BE is used, and what functions it performs at specific stages of composition. This study aims to investigate the functions of BE-copula in argumentative essays written by non-native speaker (NS) and native speaker (NNS) learners and determine the similarities and differences in the way the learners use BE­-copula in their essays.
 
 Methodology: This descriptive study employed a corpus-based methodology with the corpus data obtained from the Malaysian Corpus of Learner English (MACLE) and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Only data from L1-Malay learners, which were extracted from MACLE, and which form a sub-corpus of L1-Malay learner argumentative essays, were analyzed in the study. Adopting Hyland’s three-stage structure of an argumentative essay as the framework for analysis, data were analyzed for the distribution of BE-copula and the functions it performed in the learner essays.
 
 Findings: Results from the quantitative analysis revealed a similar pattern in the use of BE-copula between NNS and NS learners, with both groups showing an inclination towards the present forms (is, are) and BE-copula construction. A t-test analysis revealed a more significant use of BE-copula in terms of both forms and functions by the NS learners. The qualitative analysis revealed that even though the NNS learners exhibited almost similar composing elements as the NS counterparts, their texts were stylistically simple, more constrained, less fluent, and effective due to limited syntactic variety.
 Contributions: The empirical findings from the in depth quantitative and qualitative analyses have enabled more insightful conclusions to be drawn about the NNS learners’ use of BE-copula in their writing. The present study has direct pedagogical implications for the teaching of academic writing in the ESL context.
 
 Keywords: Argumentative essay, academic writing, be-copula, corpus-based, learner corpus research.
 
 Cite as: Abdul Aziz, R., Abas, N., & Yusob, K. F. (2022). A corpus-based study of be-copula in native speaker and non-native speaker learners’ argumentative essays. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 7(2), 21-43. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol7iss2pp21-43

A longitudinal study of L2 historical writing

Unlike most research performed to date on writing proficiency in formal settings—which is cross-sectional and unrelated to disciplinary content—the aim of this paper is to offer a longitudinal description of the lexical richness in the L2 historical writing of CLIL bilingual secondary school students over a three-year period. The automated tool Coh-Metrix 3.0 was used to analyse the evolution of the lexical diversity, density and sophistication of a learner corpus made up of 75 history essays composed by the same 15 students as part of their L2 (English-taught) history lessons. The results show an increase in the number of lexical items employed by the students and in the abstractness and associability of these items. This indicates that students improved their lexical richness, while developing their writing proficiency and history literacy skills.

Discourse functions of lexical bundles in Indonesian EFL learners’ argumentative essays: A corpus study

Lexical bundles are functional units that are essential to building texts. However, lexical bundles vary due to some aspects, e.g., nativity, professionalism, text genre, etc. This study explored functional categories of lexical bundles in EFL written production, i.e., argumentative essays, focusing on 3-, 4-, and 5-word sequences employed by English major students in Indonesia. The data were taken from a learner corpus comprising 169 argumentative essays with 87.939 tokens. The lexical bundles were identified by using computerized and manual procedures. The identified bundles were then classified into functional categories and subcategories by Hyland. The results show that all functional categories were identified in the learner corpus proving the importance of those functions in students’ essays. Regarding the distribution, research-oriented bundles are the most frequent bundles in the corpus, while text-oriented bundles are the least frequent. Although all functional categories were found, the structuring signals (a subcategory of text-oriented bundles) were absent in the corpus. Moreover, this study found the gap between tokens and types of each bundle function, indicating the restricted variants of bundles used by the learners. Considering the low frequency of text-oriented bundles, the absence of structuring bundles, and restricted bundles, thus the exposure of more lexical bundles serving multiple functions in writing materials is necessary, especially bundles used for organizing and structuring texts.

Handle it in-house?

Abstract Vocabulary lists of high-frequency lexical items are an important resource in language education and a key product of corpus research. However, no single vocabulary list will be useful for every learning context, with the appropriateness of such lists affected by the corpora on which they are based. This paper investigates the impact of corpus selection on one measure of lexical sophistication, Advanced Guiraud, focusing on two frequency lists originating from an in-house learner corpus (PELIC) and a global learner corpus (Cambridge Learner Corpus). This analysis shows that frequency lists derived from both types of learner corpus can effectively serve as the basis for measuring the development of lexical sophistication, regardless of the specific program of the learners. Therefore, publicly available learner corpus frequency lists can be a reliable resource for stakeholders interested in the lexical gains of language learners.

Phraseology in a cross-linguistic perspective: A diachronic and corpus-based account

AbstractEnglish exerts great influence on other languages at the lexical level, as seen from extensive borrowing of terminology and everyday words into many languages (i.e. Anglicisms such as swap, blog, etc.). Although much less studied, it is also clear that the “phrasicon” (Granger, Sylviane. 2009. Comment on: learner corpora: A window onto the L2 phrasicon. In Andy Barfield & Henrik Gyllstad (eds.),Researching collocations in another language. multiple interpretations, 60–65. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan) of a language can similarly be affected by such external influence. This paper investigates “the largely unexplored area of phraseological borrowing” (Fielder, Sabine (2017) Phraseological borrowing from English into German: Cultural andpragmatic implications. Journal of Pragmatics 113: 89–102, 90) by introducing the diachronic-contrastive corpus method and exemplifying it with reference to a set of expressions that have been considered the products of language contact between English and Norwegian. I argue that the proposed corpus method can be used efficiently for investigating phraseology across time, for shedding light on the question of whether cross-linguistically parallel structures are the result of borrowing or parallel developments, and – importantly – as a vehicle for rejecting preconceived ideas about a form’s alleged origin in English.

Crowdsourced Adaptive Comparative Judgment: A Community‐Based Solution for Proficiency Rating

AbstractThe main objective of this Methods Showcase Article is to show how the technique of adaptive comparative judgment, coupled with a crowdsourcing approach, can offer practical solutions to reliability issues as well as to address the time and cost difficulties associated with a text‐based approach to proficiency assessment in L2 research. We showcased this method by reporting on the methodological framework implemented in the Crowdsourcing Language Assessment Project and by presenting the results of a first study that demonstrated that a crowd is able to assess learner texts with high reliability. We found no effect of language skills or language assessment experience on the assessment task, but judges who had received formal language assessment training seemed to differ in their decisions from judges who had not received such training. However, the scores generated by the crowdsourced task exhibited a strong positive correlation with the rubric‐based scores provided with the learner corpus used.

Adversative Connectors Use in EFL and Native Students’ Writing: A Contrastive Analysis

A compelling body of evidence suggests that EFL students have problem with logical connectors’ appropriate use in writing. This study explored Iranian EFL students’ adversative connectors use in their essay writing course. To this end, a Learner Corpus of 60393 words consisting of 156 essays was compiled. LOCNESS was chosen as the criterion corpus. AntConc, a freeware concordance program, was used to analyze the data. The findings revealed that, in general, learners underused adversative connectors; both native and non-native students used but the most; on the other hand, and while were overused and despite, yet, and instead were underused by the learners suggesting that the top five most overused adversative connectors make up around 72% of learners’ adversative connector use indicating that learners tend to use the same adversative connectors at the cost of underusing the other ones. Analysis of concordance line also illustrated that the learners tended to misuse the subordinating conjunction whereas and though in the initial position. It seems that learners need to be taught how to distinguish between different types of adversative connectors and how to use a wider variety of adversative connectors to reach a better coherence and cohesion in their writings.

Effects of Availability, Contingency, and Formulaicity on the Accuracy of English Grammatical Morphemes in Second Language Writing

AbstractWe investigated whether the accuracy of grammatical morphemes in second language (L2) learners’ writing is associated with usage‐based distributional factors. Specifically, we examined whether the accuracy of L2 English inflectional morphemes is associated with the availability (i.e., token frequency) and contingency (i.e., token frequency relative to other forms with the same lemma) of the inflected word form as well as the formulaicity of the context in which it occurs (i.e., predictability of the form given the surrounding words). Data drawn from a large‐scale learner corpus indicated that contingency is a robust predictor of morpheme accuracy, thereby supporting the usage‐based view that language learners are sensitive to distributional properties in their input. Furthermore, the relationship of contingency with accuracy does not necessarily lessen when learners’ proficiency rises. Contrary to previous research investigating online processing, we did not identify in our study availability and formulaicity as predictors of accuracy of morpheme production in writing.