A Bird’s-eye View of Corpus-Driven Interlanguage Error Analysis of Portuguese EFL Learners and Data-Driven Teaching Suggestions for EFL Teachers


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Aybek S., Can C.

36th Annual APPI Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, 12 - 14 May 2023, vol.1, no.1, pp.51-64

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Full Text
  • Volume: 1
  • City: Lisbon
  • Country: Portugal
  • Page Numbers: pp.51-64
  • Çukurova University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

The study aims to reveal the errors of Portuguese EFL learners who took PET, PETfS,

KET, KETfS, FCE, FCEfS, CAE exams using corpus-based error analysis tools available

on SketchEngine platform and classifying them according to the A2-C2 language

proficiency levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

(Council of Europe, 2001). These Cambridge ESOL Exams extracted from the

Cambridge Learner Corpus (CLC) contain 42-million-words of more than 200,000

students from 173 countries. When the distribution of errors is examined according to

the A2–C2 language proficiency levels, while the variety of error taxonomies increases,

the frequency of errors decreases, and persistency of error taxonomies is observed. The

study also compares the errors of L1 Portuguese students with the errors made by

learners from other mother tongue backgrounds available in the corpus to reveal whether

there is an EFL interlanguage pattern in learner errors.