How native language and L2 proficiency affect EFL learners’ capitalisation abilities: a large-scale corpus study

Abstract

Capitalisation is a salient orthographic feature, which plays an important role in linguistic processing during reading, and in writing assessment. Learners’ second language (L2) capitalisation skills are influenced by their native language (L1), but earlier studies of L1 influence did not focus on learners’ capitalisation, and examined primarily ‘narrow’ samples. This study examines capitalisation error patterns in a large-scale corpus of over 133,000 texts, composed by nearly 38,000 EFL learners, who represent seven different L1s and a wide range of English proficiency levels. The findings show that speakers of all L1s made a large number of capitalisation errors, in terms of errors per word and error proportion (out of all errors), especially at lower L2 proficiency levels. Under-capitalisation was more common than over-capitalisation, though this gap narrowed over time. Interestingly, L1s which share English's Latin script had higher error rates, suggesting that (assumed) perceived similarity between the L1 and the L2 increases interference, though this interference could not be explained only through direct negative transfer. There was also an interaction between L1 influence and L2 proficiency, so that differences between speakers of different L1s became smaller as their L2 proficiency improved.

Examining the potential influence of crosslinguistic lexical similarity on word-choice transfer in L2 English

“…Most learners only had a single text in the sample (the mean number of texts per learner was 1.36 in the first subcorpus and 1.41 in the second). Multiple texts per learner were included to achieve sufficient coverage of the sample, in line with prior studies on the EFCAMDAT [e.g., 39 , 44 , 45 ]. See the “Sample information” document in the OSF repository for more details (under “Number of texts per learner”).…”

“…Finally, note that past studies on the EFCAMDAT found L1 transfer effects on various other linguistic structures and phenomena, including clause subordination [46], relative clauses [47], clause-initial prepositional phrases [48], grammatical morphemes [49], articles [50], and capitalization [44]. X. Jiang et al even found evidence of lexical transfer on the usage rates of certain punctuation marks (e.g., dashes) and phrases (e.g., "to my mind") [48].…”

Numerical Analysis and Optimization of Feature Extraction-Oriented English Reading Corpus

“…Starting from the English reading corpus, Lee et al [2] studied the correlation between the English corpus and learners' mastery of vocabulary and solved the problem of vocabulary learning by encouraging learners to self-analyze and construct an English reading corpus [2]. Shatz [3] analyzed the role of capitalization in language processing and writing assessment during reading from the capitalization error patterns in an English reading corpus constructed from 133,000 texts of 38,000 foreign learners [3]. Guziurová [4] constructed an English reading corpus from English-type articles written by nonnative English-speaking research scholars and compared it with an English reading corpus constructed based on articles written by English writers designed by SciELF [4].…”