The use of the English article system by Chinese and Spanish learners

Díez-Bedmar, María Belén; Papp, Szilvia

doi:10.1163/9789401206204_007

Cited by 66 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Chinese learners of English are a population on which this issue has often been illustrated (e.g. Díez-Bedmar & Papp, 2008; Han, 2009; Lardiere, 2004; Lu, 2001; Robertson, 2000; Trenkic, 2008). Our current findings, however, suggest that such learners may nevertheless be sensitive to the information signalled by articles in real-time comprehension.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We recruited Mandarin speakers of intermediate proficiency in English (IELTS score of at least 6, which is necessary to gain entry for a study at a UK university), as this population is reported to have difficulties with English articles (e.g. Díez-Bedmar & Papp, 2008; Robertson, 2000; Trenkic, 2008). The criteria for inclusion in the study were that participants were Mandarin speakers and not raised as English–Mandarin bilinguals.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Real-time grammar processing by native and non-native speakers: Constructions unique to the second language

2013

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We investigated second language (L2) comprehension of grammatical structures that are unique to the L2, and which are known to cause persistent difficulties in production. A visual-world eye-tracking experiment focused on online comprehension of English articles by speakers of the article-lacking Mandarin, and a control group of English native speakers. The results show that non-native speakers from article-lacking backgrounds can incrementally utilise the information signalled by L2 articles in real time to constrain referential domains and resolve reference more efficiently. The findings support the hypothesis that L2 processing does not always over-rely on pragmatic affordances, and that some morphosyntactic structures unique to the target language can be processed in a targetlike manner in comprehension – despite persistent difficulties with their production. A novel proposal, based on multiple meaning-to-form, but consistent form-to-meaning mappings, is developed to account for such comprehension–production asymmetries.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-time grammar processing by native and non-native speakers: Constructions unique to the second language

2013

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“…Learner corpora have the added advantages of (a) lending insights into actual attested difficulties rather than the sometimes invented examples provided by earlier error analysis and (b) enabling the study of errors in their full context rather than in short, decontextualized sentences. Studying errors via learner corpora has become known as computer‐aided error analysis (henceforth CEA) (Dagneaux et al, ) and has given rise to a rich body of literature on a variety of error types (e.g., Darus & Ching, ; Díez–Bedmar & Papp, ; Granger, ; Osborne, , ; for a detailed review of the work in CEA, see Thewissen, ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Capturing L2 Accuracy Developmental Patterns: Insights From an Error‐Tagged EFL Learner Corpus

Thewissen

2013

The Modern Language Journal

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The present article addresses the issue of second language accuracy developmental trajectories and shows how they can be captured via an error-tagged version of an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learner corpus. The data used in this study were extracted from the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al., 2009) and consist of a total of 223 learner essays. Each composition was (a) manually and exhaustively annotated for errors following the Louvain errortagging taxonomy (Dagneaux, Denness, & Granger, 1998) and (b) individually rated by two (sometimes three) testing experts according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001) descriptors for linguistic competence. As a result, each text was assigned a B1 (lower intermediate), B2 (upper intermediate), C1 (advanced), or C2 (near-native) score. A refined counting method, potential occasion analysis, which relies on both an error-tagged and a part-of-speech-tagged version of the learner data, was used to quantify the errors. This allowed the analysis to trace the type of development displayed by more than 40 error types along the B1-C2 proficiency range. The results indicate that the EFL error developmental patterns tend to be dominated by progress and stabilization trends and that progress is often located between B1 and B2.

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“…Difficulties with Mandarin and Korean L2 English learners and English article acquisition have been widely reported (Diez-Bedmar and Papp, 2008;Crosthwaite, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2016a, 2016b, Crosthwaite and Choy, 2016, while corpus studies of Chinese students by Milton (2001), Papp (2004) and Chuang and Nesi (2006) found that Chinese writers experienced considerable difficulty with L2 English noun number as well as missing or redundant particles/prepositions (e.g. *'people want a better quality [of] life / 'The United Kingdom still remains outside [of] the EU', Chuang and Nesi, 2006:265).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As such, L2 English learners from these reference varieties tend to struggle to adopt the obligatory forms of the L2 target when compared with more similar reference varieties such as Spanish (e.g. Diez-Bedmar and Papp, 2008, Diez-Bedmar, 2015 or Russian (e.g. Robertson, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Almost people’: A Learner Corpus Account of L2 Use and Misuse of Non-numerical Quantification

2016

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Abstract:We present an Integrated Contrastive Model of non-numerical quantificational NPs (NNQs, i.e. 'some people') produced by L1 English speakers and Mandarin and Korean L2 English learners. Learner corpus data was sourced from the ICNALE (Ishikawa, 2011(Ishikawa, , 2013 across four L2 proficiency levels. An average 10% of L2 NNQs were specific to L2 varieties, including noun number mismatches (*'many child'), omitting obligatory quantifiers after adverbs (*'almost people'), adding unnecessary particles (*'all of people') and non-L1 English-like quantifier/noun agreement (*'many water'). Significantly fewer 'openclass' NNQs (e.g a number of people) are produced by L2 learners, preferring 'closed-class' single lexical quantifiers (following L1-like use). While such production is predictable via L1 transfer, Korean L2 English learners produced significantly more L2-like NNQs at each proficiency level, which was not entirely predictable under a transfer account. We thus consider whether positive transfer of other linguistic forms (i.e. definiteness marking) aids the learnability of other L2 forms (i.e. expression of quantification).

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The use of the English article system by Chinese and Spanish learners

Cited by 66 publications

References 0 publications

Real-time grammar processing by native and non-native speakers: Constructions unique to the second language

Real-time grammar processing by native and non-native speakers: Constructions unique to the second language

Capturing L2 Accuracy Developmental Patterns: Insights From an Error‐Tagged EFL Learner Corpus

‘Almost people’: A Learner Corpus Account of L2 Use and Misuse of Non-numerical Quantification

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