Preposition Errors Research Articles

AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF GRAMMATICAL FEATURES IN REPORT TEXT BY THE ELEVENTH GRADE STUDENTS OF ACCOUNTING MAJOR AT SMK N 1 JORLANG HATARAN

This study is purposed to describe the errors in grammatical features of report text. In addition, this study is also aimed to describe the possible causes of those errors. This study applied the descriptive qualitative approach in which the data was obtained from the report texts that were written by the eleventh grade students of accounting major in SMK N 1 Jorlang Hataran. The data were collected by using students’ report texts and questionnaires. The data then were analyzed by identifying the errors first, then describing the errors, and the last explaining the errors. The errors that occurred in students’ texts are errors in verbs, sentences, prepositions, articles, agreements, pronouns, modifiers, and tenses. The result of the study indicates that the students made 541 grammatical errors which were classified into: 37,15% errors in verbs, 18,85% errors in noun, 15,15% errors in sentence, 11,27% errors in preposition, 7,76% errors in article, 4,06% errors in pronoun, 3,51% errors in modifier, and 2,21% errors in tenses. The students’ errors were caused by 31,23% ignorance of grammatical rules, 28,09% incomplete application of rules, 15,89% false concept hypothesized, 13,86% interference of interlingual transfer, 9,05% wrong communication strategy, 1,84% over-generalization.

Generating Artificial Error Data for Indonesian Preposition Error Corrections

Generating Artificial Error Data for Indonesian Preposition Error Corrections

A Method for Correcting Preposition Errors in Learner English with Feedback Messages

A Method for Correcting Preposition Errors in Learner English with Feedback Messages

Error Analysis in Two Nigerian Newspapers

The purpose of this study was to explicate the nature of errors shown in two Nigerian newspapers, Punch and Vanguard. For the purpose, the authors of this study first identified errors shown in the newspapers, and then classified them into some categories. Finally, they made an attempt to explain the causes of the errors. In analyzing errors, this study employed theoretical frame works of Corder’s error analysis and Selinker’s interlanguage. Through a qualitative analysis, the authors identified and analyzed twenty-one errors in both newspapers. Some types of errors that were more frequently identified were prepositional errors, capitalization errors, malapropism, and others. It was found that error types in both newspapers were identical, probably because the writers/journalists would experience the same sociolinguistic background and educational system. The errors shown in the two newspapers could be instances of interlanguage transfer or poor knowledge of English grammar rules. The study made some implications for L2 language teaching as the analyzed errors could serve useful resources in terms of curriculum design for educating L2 learners in professional and other language learning situations.

Contrastive analysis of Turkish and English in Turkish EFL learners’ spoken discourse

<p>The present study aimed at finding whether L1 Turkish caused interference errors on Turkish EFL learners’ spoken English discourse. Whether English proficiency level had any effect on the number of errors learners made was further investigated. The participants were given the chance to choose one of the two alternative topics to speak about. The entire videotaped speaking session was further transcribed to analyze the spoken errors. The results indicated that prepositional, lexical, and grammatical errors were the most frequently encountered errors, in descending order. Also, independent samples t-test was applied to the data to determine whether English proficiency level had any effect on the number of errors made by two different English proficiency groups. It was found that there was no significant difference between two different English proficiency groups with regard to the number of errors they made.</p>

Investigating Morpho-Syntactic Translation Errors Made by Yemeni EFL Students

This study investigates the most common morpho-syntactic Arabic-English and English-Arabic translation errors made by fourth year students of the English Department (Translation Program) at the University of Science and Technology (UST) in Yemen. It identifies how frequently these errors occur and sheds light on issues for EFL students and translation teachers in Yemen in general and the UST in particular, regarding the importance of having a good command of both Arabic and English. This may help learners identify and reduce such errors. In this empirical study, a test of 20 English and 20 Arabic sentences was given to the subjects of the study to be translated into Arabic and English respectively. Findings from the study show that the students make significantly more errors in tense, noun, verb, preposition, pronoun, relative clauses, article, and voice when they translate sentences from Arabic into English. There are also no significant differences in the students' translation in terms of agreement, word order, mood, and condition. The study concludes with some important recommendations such as adding a course on contrastive analysis and other Arabic language courses to the curriculum of the Translation Program in the English Department. Teachers and students are advised to take into account the different morpho-syntactic rules when teaching or translating respectively.

Investigating The Effect Of Grammatical Differences Between English (L2) And Arabic (L1) On Saudi Female Students’ Writing Of English

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the grammatical errors committed by the Female Saudi Students can be attributed to their mother tongue interference. This study analyses 120 English essays written by Arabic speaking Saudi Female Students studying at Prince Fahad Bin Sultan University. Since the researcher’s mother-tongue is also Arabic, the interference of Arabic language committed by these students was easily found upon examining their writings. The findings of this study revealed that the transfer of Arabic linguistic structures influenced the English writings of Saudi Female Students on the grammatical level. Furthermore, the English writing skill of the Saudi Female Students needs development. The study concluded that the percentage of the total grammatical errors committed by the Saudi students was 1179 errors. Out of the 1179 errors, 59 errors were in Active and Passive Voice, 118 errors in plurality, 118 errors also in articles, 165 errors in the use of word order, 188 errors in prepositions, 244 errors in Verb Tenses and Form, and 306 errors in Subject-verb agreement which is the highest percentage of errors as a result of the effect of the L1. On the basis of these findings, a group of recommendations and some pedagogical implications for educators and policy makers were provided to improve the EFL teaching-learning process.

Learner Corpus and Academic Writing: Identifying the Error Patterns of Taiwanese EFL Students

<p>The purpose of this study is to find practical implications for improving academic writing curriculum design by exploring lexical and grammatical errors produced by EFL learners in a vocational institution in Taiwan. To satisfy this purpose, a small learner corpus was compiled in this study. The data were obtained from 58 undergraduate students of a public vocational university from September 2012 to June 2013 in Taiwan. There are 112 essays in the corpus that include 34,426 tokens. Learner errors were annotated based on the error categories found in (Dagneaux et al, 1996). Transfer errors and intralingual errors were analyzed. Lexical Tutor and AntConc software were used to conduct the analyses. Lexical errors, including incorrect word choices, misspellings, and word insertions, deletions or replacements occurred primarily due to students’ insufficient mastery of vocabulary. The top three grammatical errors were verb forms, article errors, and preposition errors. Based on the research results, pedagogical implications that focus on teaching EAP writing to vocational university students in Taiwan are discussed.</p>

Exploiting Syntactic Similarities for Preposition Error Corrections on Indonesian Sentences Written by Second Language Learner

We propose a method to artificially generate training data to correct preposition errors in Indonesian sentences written by second language learners. Basically, we injected large size of native sentences with preposition errors learned from learners’ sentences. Our method copies a preposition error from a learner sentence to a native sentence by firstly calculating a syntactic similarity score between the native sentence and the learners’ sentence. Then, it chooses the preposition error from the learner sentence that has the highest syntactic similarity score to the native sentence, to replace the original preposition in the native sentence.Experimental results show that the preposition error correction model trained on the artificial data resulted from our method outperforms the correction model trained on the similar size of native data.

Narrative production skills of language minority learners and their English-only classmates in early adolescence

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the narrative production skills of early-adolescent, Spanish-speaking language minority (LM) learners (n = 43) and their English-only (EO) peers (n = 38). The sample was born in the United States, educated in English, and representative of low- and high-income backgrounds. Using a picture book as a prompt, students’ narratives were transcribed, coded, and compared on macrostructure skills (story structure), microstructure skills (discrete language skills: vocabulary and grammar), and use of mazes (disruptions in speech). Results demonstrated that the groups did not differ on story structure. However, LM learners produced lengthier narratives than their EO peers, ones that resulted in stories that were less grammatically diverse and included more grammatical revisions and errors in prepositions. Thus, by early adolescence, EO and LM learners in urban schools may have well-developed macrostructure skills, yet the LM learners may still be developing specific microstructure skills.

Prepositional Errors in the Writings of Pakistani ESL Students

Today, English has emerged as an important means of communication across the world including Pakistan. In Pakistan, it enjoys the status of second language as it is offered as a compulsory subject from primary level up to higher classes. In addition, there is great need and demand for having a sound grasp over English language to encounter professional challenges. However, Pakistani learners still face various problems while speaking and writing English. This study examined the abuse of English prepositions by Pakistani learners. It focused on the types of prepositional errors found in their English writing. Moreover, the study investigated whether male learners committed more preposition errors or female. For this purpose, twenty six (26) students of HSSC (thirteen participants from each gender) were chosen through systematic random sampling under Quantitative research paradigm. The data were collected through composition test and essay writing which were then analyzed through tables and graphics. Consequently, the study found out various types of prepositional errors in the participants’ writing. Besides, the study showed higher ratio of errors in female participants’ writing than the males’. At the end of the study, some recommendations were given as how to lessen the ratio of English preposition errors in Pakistani learners’ writing.

An investigation into current measures of linguistic accuracy in second language writing research

This study begins by describing measures of linguistic accuracy in second language writing research. We first report on measures that have been used in the last ten years including holistic measures, error-free units, number of errors, number of specific error types, and measures that take error severity into account. We discuss differences in the measures used now vs. those reported on in Polio (1997) and conclude that interrater reliability and detailed coding guidelines are still underreported, making replication of studies very difficult. We then apply ten of these measures to the MSU data set to determine which are the most reliable and which best show change over time. The measures comprise holistic and error-free units as well as counts of specific error types. With the exception of counts of certain error types, we were able to obtain over .80 reliability on the measures though some of the measures were much easier to use than others. In addition, we attempted to determine whether or not these measures were measuring the same or different constructs by looking at correlations and change over time. Among the correlations, some were expected and some not. One conclusion was that weighted error-free units did not seem to differ from standard error-free units. Only the holistic measures and the number of preposition errors showed any change over time.

The Effect of Overt Prepositional Input on Students’ Written Accuracy

I believe that there should be a focus on problematic language issues such as prepositions in the language classroom in order to provide continuous exposure to such features. Consequently I provided my students with supplementary activities on prepositions, and also promoted learner autonomy by highlighting urls which deal with collocation. Analysis of the students written output shows the input to have been successful in focussing students’ attention on this problematic language aspect. While a pre-input writing task generated 83 prepositional errors , at the rate of 1 in every 48 words, longer post-input tasks only generated 76 prepositional errors at the rate of 1 in every 215 words. Consequently, I plan to continue providing students with input on this often neglected language feature, in order to increase students’ written accuracy.

A Correcting Model for Preposition Error in English Essays of Chinese Student Based on Hybrid Features Classification

In this paper, we propose an automatic preposition correction method for Chinese learners of English. Our corpus comes from Chinese learners of English Corpus (CLEC). We use N-gram model to extract the semantic features based on the form of the word in context, part of speech tagging and syntactic parse tree. Meanwhile, this paper proposes a new method based on mutual information and improves the training and classification method. This method’s performance has been improved in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency, and the results show a significant improvement compared with the previous results.

Common Preposition Errors Committed by Iranian Students

This paper examined some common problems involving prepositions in learning a second language. Many students learning English as a foreign language commonly commit mistakes in prepositions. The aim of this paper is to survey the causes of errors in the use of prepositions that are frequently made by Iranian students. A diagnostic test (35 Multiple choice item) was constructed to test the students proficiency in using these prepositions. The prepositions selected for this purpose were; to, in, at, on, with, of, from, for, about, during, into under, over and by. This test was given to a group of 35 intermediate students. The results indicated that the errors committed by the students were due to both Inter-lingual and Intra-lingual interferences. It is hoped that this research will help teachers of English Language to be aware of these problems and re-evaluate their teaching approach.

Grammatical Error Correction and Retention in EFL Students: A Case Study of EFL Students in Thailand

This study aimed to examine grammatical error types, retention of the correction in the students’ writing, and their opinions on the error correction. The research was conducted on 30 first year English-major students studying a grammar course of 15 weeks at UttaraditRajabhat University in Thailand. The study analyzed 1,800 sentences, and errors found in the exercises were compared to those of the follow-up tests. The analysis used percentage, means, and standard deviations. The results indicated the most grammatical errors found were errors in verb, the others including errors in determiner, noun, preposition, sentence structure, adverb, and adjective. The correction by group discussion improved writing ability, and retained. The students’ opinions on the way of error correction were at high level.

Corpus-based Analysis of Collocational Errors1

The present study investigates the use of high-frequency verb collocations in L2 learner English. Although it has been widely accepted that collocations are essential to language use, until recently, the complexity of collocations was mainly hidden. However, developments in the new technology of corpus linguistics and the availability of large electronic texts from spoken and written sources have made possible new perspectives to learner language use. In addition, learner corpus data constitutes a new type of performance data which offers a valuable view of learners’ errors and non-errors as well. This study is thus embedded in a combination of elaborate manual investigation and computer-aided analysis using a concordance program, WordSmith Tools. The results of this study show that errors are not entirely mismatch between the verb and the noun, and other types such as prepositional errors and determiner errors were relatively more frequent among advanced L2 learners. It is also found that the interference of the Korean learners’ L1 plays a role in the use of collocations. Based on the results, some suggestions are made for collocation learning that is helpful for EFL learners.

Automatic Detection of Preposition Errors in Learner Writing

In this article, we present an approach to the automatic correction of preposition errors in L2 English. Our system, based on a maximum entropy classifier, achieves average precision of 42% and recall of 35% on this task. The discussion of results obtained on correct and incorrect data aims to establish what characteristics of L2 writing prove particularly problematic in this task.

A Cross-linguistic Study of Prepositions in Persian and English: The Effect of Transfer

The present paper is a contrastive study which attempts to investigate the errors made by Iranian EFL learners due to the cross-linguistic influence between their L1/SL and L2/TL language (i.e. Persian & English respectively). To meet the goals of the study, an error analysis was conducted to examine the status of different types of errors of prepositions made due to the transitional constraints between Persian and English languages. To this end, a translation task was developed by the present researcher. The translation task aimed at identifying the interlingual preposition errors caused by the process of transfer between the target language (English) and the source language (Persian). The translation task was then given to 53 adult EFL learners at intermediate level to translate the sentences from Persian into English during the allotted time. After collecting and analyzing the data, the corollaries of the study indicated that the Iranian EFL learners under investigation were faced with the errors related to the wrong and redundant use of prepositions more frequently as compared with the errors related to the omission of prepositions in L2 while translating from Persian into English. The findings might make a significant contribution to the preparation of corpus of preposition errors in Iranian EFL learners discourse and thus inform Iranian ELT practitioners and teachers of the cross-linguistic areas of difficulties concerning the acquisition of second language prepositions.

Grammatical errors produced by English majors: The translation task

This study investigated the frequency of the grammatical errors related to the four categories of preposition, relative pronoun, article, and tense using the translation task. In addition, the frequencies of these grammatical errors in different categories and in each category were examined. The quantitative component of the study further looked at the differences between literature and translation students in the frequencies in different categories. A total of 60 junior EFL students (30 literature and 30 translation), all studied at Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, participated in this survey. Four translation tests, three in Persian and one in English, were given to the participants to investigate the difficulties of the Persian native speakers learning English. This study showed that the students had the most number of errors in preposition (100.0%), relative pronoun (56.7%), article (25.0%), and tense (6.7%) respectively. The results also revealed that there is a statistically significant difference between the frequencies of the grammatical errors in each category. Furthermore, there is also a statistically significant difference between literature and translation students in the frequencies in different categories.