Since its publication in 2001, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has gained a leading role as an instrument of reference for language teaching and certification. Nonetheless, there is a growing concern about CEFR levels being insufficiently illustrated in terms of authentic learner data. Such concern grows even stronger when considering languages other than English...

Lexical bundles studies are still limited in relation to the use of verb phrase-based bundles, specifically passive forms academic writing. This study reveals lexico-grammatical patterns and functional categories 409,373-word Malaysian Polytechnics Electronic Engineering Learner Corpus (MyPolyEELC) comparison British Academic Written English (BAWE) 29,530-word sub-corpus. The Sketch Engine lexi...

Many  elements  contribute  to  the  relative  difficulty  in  acquiring  specific  aspects  of  English  as  a foreign  language  (Goldschneider  &  DeKeyser,  2001).  Modal  auxiliary  verbs  (e.g.  could,  might), are  examples  of  a  structure  that  is  difficult  for  many  learners.  Not  only  are  they  particularly complex  semantically,  but  especially  in  the  Malaysian  context ...

This paper introduces a new two-level error tagset, AALETA (Alfaifi Atwell Leeds Error Tagset for Arabic), to be used for annotating the Arabic Learner Corpora (ALC). The new tagset includes six broad classes, subdivided into 37 more specific error types or subcategories. It is easily understood by Arabic corpus error annotators. AALEETA is based on an existing error tagset for Arabic corpora, ...

This study presents a contrastive analysis of gerundial and infinitival complementation produced by Spanish and German ESL learners and English native speakers. An analysis of more than 1,100 attestations of the target constructions obtained from the International Corpus of Learner English reveals that (i) advanced learners’ construction choices are not necessarily ungrammatical, yet often non-...

This article presents an environment developed for Learner Corpus Research and Error Analysis which makes it possible to deal with language errors from different points of view and with several aims. In the field of Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL), our objective is to gain a better understanding of the language learning process. In the field of Natural Language Processin...

1. Introduction Our study is concerned with the identification of 'difficult' structures in the acquisition of a foreign language, which will shed light on theoretical considerations of L2 processing. We argue that – compared to simple vocabulary items or abstract syntactic patterns – structures that contain lexical material as well as categorial variables are especially difficult to acquire. T...

We revisit morpheme studies to evaluate the long-standing claim for a universal order of acquisition. We investigate the L2 acquisition order of six English grammatical morphemes by learners from seven L1 groups across five proficiency levels. Data are drawn from approximately 10,000 written exam scripts from the Cambridge Learner Corpus. The study establishes clear L1 influence on the absolute...

In corpus creation human annotation is expensive. Annotation costs can be minimized through machine learning and active learning, however there are many complex interactions among the machine learner, the active learning technique, the annotation cost, human annotation accuracy, the annotator user interface, and several other elements of the process. For example, we show that changing the way i...