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