The Study of Errors Committed by the Eighth Grade Students of SMP Negeri 10 Denpasar in English Writing

Studi ini berfokus pada analisis tipe-tipe, sumber-sumber dan manajemen dari error yang dilakukan oleh siswa kelas delapan di SMP Negeri 10 Denpasar dalam menulis paragraph deskriptif dan narratif dalam bahasa Inggris. Penelitian ini di desain secara Descriptive Qualitatively melalui suatu observasi. Data yang digunakan untuk mengidentifikasi tipe-tipe error dikumpulkan dengan cara memberikan tugas ke siswa untuk menulis paragraph deskriptif dan narrative. Data untuk mencari sumber-sumber kesalahan diperoleh melalui Focus Group Discussion. Sedangkan, data untuk manajemen error di peroleh lewat process approach dalam menulis. Hasil pertama dari penelitian menunjukkan 7 tipe error yaitu judul paragraph, topic kalimat, kalimat penjelas, koheren antar kalimat, diksi, grammar dan mekanik penulisan. Temuan yang kedua menunjukkan ada empat sumber error, yaitu, ketidaktahuan tentang indicator dalam menulis, kurangnya latihan dalam menulis paragraph deskriptif dan narrative, lupa pada aturan grammar, ejaan dan penggunaan kata. Ada juga beberapa error yang tidak termasuk ke dalam tiga sumber error di atas. Hasil yang ketiga menunjukkan bahwa tipe dan sumber error yang ada masih sama, namun jumlah siswa yang melakukan dan menyatakan alasan yang sama berkurang. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan kepada para guru tentang perlunya menerapkan process approach dalam menulis paragraf deskriptif dan narratif. Sementara itu, siswa seharusnya memperoleh pengetahuan tetntang indicator dalam menulis serta sering latihan dalam menulis paragraph deskriptif dan narratif. Terlebih lagi, bagi para peneliti di masa depan agar mencari alternatif lain selain process approach untuk memanajemen error secara lebih efisien dan efektif.Kata Kunci : Menulis , Process Approach,TIpe dan Sumber Error This study was focused on analyzing the types, the sources and the management of errors committed by the eighth grade students of SMP Negeri 10 Denpasar in writing descriptive and narrative paragraphs. This research was designed descriptive qualitatively through an observation. The data for the types of errors were collected by assigning students to write descriptive and narrative paragraphs. The data for the sources of errors were collected through Focus Group Discussion. Whereas, data for the management of errors were collected through a process approach in writing. The obtained data were analyzed descriptively in term of types and sources of errors. The first research finding shows seven errors namely title of the paragraphs, the topic sentence, the development of paragraphs, the coherence, the diction, the grammar, and the mechanics. The second finding shows the four sources of errors namely absence of knowledge about writing indicators, less practice in writing descriptive and narrative paragraphs, forgetting about grammatical rules, spelling and the USAge of the words. Some errors are unclassifiable based on previous criteria. The third finding shows that the types and sources of errors remained the same, however the number of students committed and reasoning such errors are reduced. The findings imply the necessity for the teacher to implement process approach in writing descriptive and narrative paragraphs. Meanwhile, the students should gain knowledge about writing indicators, and practice in writing descriptive and narrative paragraphs. Moreover, future researchers need to find other alternative aside from process approach in managing errors more efficiently and effectively

The Effect of Learner Proficiency and L1 Transfer on the Use of Make by Korean EFL Learners of English

The present study investigates how learner proficiency and L1 transfer affect Korean EFL learners use of the high frequency verb, make. Using the Korean learner corpus of English, which is composed of 1,030 argumentative essays, the study first analyzes the use of make and compares that with the findings of Altenberg and Granger (2001). Results showed that Korean learners overuse make in produce and causative uses. Study, secondly, examines the effect of learners proficiency and L1 transfer on the use of make. It was found that lower-proficiency learners misuse the verb make much more frequently than advanced learners. In addition, with regard to L1 transfer, the majority of learners misuse result from L1 transfer and even advanced learners are not free from interlingual interference. As a result, this study demonstrates that Korean EFL learners errors with the use of the verb make are largely a product of L1 transfer. Pedagogical implications are provided

Problems in Evaluating Grammatical Error Detection Systems

ABSTRACT Many evaluation issues for grammatical error detection have previously been overlooked, making it hard to draw meaningful comparisons between different approaches, even when they are evaluated on the same corpus. To begin with, the three-way contingency between a writer's sentence, the annotator's correction, and the system's output makes evaluation more complex than in some other NLP tasks, which we address by presenting an intuitive evaluation scheme. Of particular importance to error detection is the skew of the data -the low frequency of errors as compared to non-errors -which distorts some traditional measures of performance and limits their usefulness, leading us to recommend the reporting of raw measurements (true positives, false negatives, false positives, true negatives). Other issues that are particularly vexing for error detection focus on defining these raw measurements: specifying the size or scope of an error, properly treating errors as graded rather than discrete phenomena, and counting non-errors. We discuss recommendations for best practices with regard to reporting the results of system evaluation for these cases, recommendations which depend upon making clear one's assumptions and applications for error detection. By highlighting the problems with current error detection evaluation, the field will be better able to move forward

Correcting semantic collocation errors with L1-induced paraphrases

EMNLP 2011 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference107-11

Computational Models of Problems with Writing of English as a Second Language Learners

Learning a new language is a challenging endeavor. As a student attempts to master the grammar usage and mechanics of the new language, they make many mistakes. Detailed feedback and corrections from language tutors are invaluable to student learning, but it is time consuming to provide such feedback. In this thesis, I investigate the feasibility of building computer programs to help to reduce the efforts of English as a Second Language (ESL) tutors. Specifically, I consider three problems: (1) whether a program can identify areas that may need the tutor’s attention, such as places where the learners have used redundant words; (2) whether a program can auto-complete a tutor’s corrections by inferring the location and reason for the correction; (3) for detecting misusages of prepositions, a common ESL error type, whether a program can automatically construct a set of potential corrections by finding words that are more likely to be confused with each other (known as a confusion set). The viability of these programs depends on whether aspects of the English language and common ESL mistakes can be described by computational models. For each task, building computational models faces unique challenges: (1) In highlighting redundant areas, it is difficult to precisely define “redundancy” in a computer’s language. (2) In auto-completing tutors’ annotations, it is difficult for computers to correctly interpret how many writing problems were addressed during revision. (3) In confusion set construction, it is difficult to infer which words are more likely confused with the given word. To address these challenges, this thesis presents different model alternatives for each task. Empirical experiments demonstrate the degrees of success to which computational models can help with detecting and correcting ESL writing problem

言語テスト手法を第二言語使用の支援システムに適用するためのフレームワーク

学位の種別:課程博士University of Tokyo(東京大学

Detecting grammatical errors with treebank-induced, probabilistic parsers

Today's grammar checkers often use hand-crafted rule systems that define acceptable language. The development of such rule systems is labour-intensive and has to be repeated for each language. At the same time, grammars automatically induced from syntactically annotated corpora (treebanks) are successfully employed in other applications, for example text understanding and machine translation. At first glance, treebank-induced grammars seem to be unsuitable for grammar checking as they massively over-generate and fail to reject ungrammatical input due to their high robustness. We present three new methods for judging the grammaticality of a sentence with probabilistic, treebank-induced grammars, demonstrating that such grammars can be successfully applied to automatically judge the grammaticality of an input string. Our best-performing method exploits the differences between parse results for grammars trained on grammatical and ungrammatical treebanks. The second approach builds an estimator of the probability of the most likely parse using grammatical training data that has previously been parsed and annotated with parse probabilities. If the estimated probability of an input sentence (whose grammaticality is to be judged by the system) is higher by a certain amount than the actual parse probability, the sentence is flagged as ungrammatical. The third approach extracts discriminative parse tree fragments in the form of CFG rules from parsed grammatical and ungrammatical corpora and trains a binary classifier to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences. The three approaches are evaluated on a large test set of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The ungrammatical test set is generated automatically by inserting common grammatical errors into the British National Corpus. The results are compared to two traditional approaches, one that uses a hand-crafted, discriminative grammar, the XLE ParGram English LFG, and one based on part-of-speech n-grams. In addition, the baseline methods and the new methods are combined in a machine learning-based framework, yielding further improvements

Learning multiword expressions from corpora and dictionaries

[Abstract] The purpose of the present thesis is to examine Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) learners’ needs when it comes to enhancing their collocation competence and use, with a view to designing an online collocation learning tool aimed at learners of Spanish. Accordingly, the research presented here corresponds to the following three aims. Firstly, SFL learners’ collocation use is explored through a learner corpus study carried out using material from the CEDEL2 corpus. SFL learners’ collocation use is compared to that of native speakers, while learner collocation errors are also examined. Secondly, the thesis examines the design and functionalities of existing learning tools that can support collocation learning, such as collocation dictionaries and corpus-based tools. More specifically, it describes a usability experiment focusing on the interface of the Diccionario de colocaciones del español, as well as a study testing SFL learners’ ability to autonomously correct collocation errors with the help of concordance data obtained from corpus. Thirdly, taking into account the findings of these studies, the design of an online collocation learning tool aimed at SFL learners is described.[Resumen] El propósito de la presente tesis es examinar las necesidades de los aprendices de español como lengua extranjera (ELE) en lo que respecta el desarrollo de su competencia y uso colocacional con el objetivo de diseñar una nueva herramienta didáctica dirigida a aprendices de español. Por consiguiente, la investigación que presentamos corresponde a los siguientes tres objetivos principales. En primer lugar, exploramos el uso colocacional de aprendices de ELE mediante un estudio de corpus de aprendices que se ha llevado a cabo utilizando datos del corpus CEDEL2. Comparamos el uso de colocaciones de aprendices al de hablantes nativos del español, y, al mismo tiempo, examinamos los errores colocacionales de aprendices. En segundo lugar, la tesis examina el diseño y las funcionalidades de herramientas didácticas existentes que pueden ser aprovechados en el aprendizaje de colocaciones como son los diccionarios de colocaciones y herramientas basadas en datos de corpus. Más específicamente, presentamos un experimento de usabilidad del Diccionario de colocaciones del español, así como un estudio que examina la destreza de aprendices de ELE en corregir errores colocacionales autónomamente con la ayuda de concordancias obtenidas de corpus. En tercer lugar, teniendo en cuenta los resultados de estos estudios, describimos el diseño de una herramienta en línea centrada en colocaciones y destinada a aprendices de ELE.[Resumo] O propósito da presente tese é examinar as necesidades dos aprendices de español como lingua estranxeira (ELE) no que respecta ao desenvolvemento da súa competencia e uso colocacional, co obxectivo de deseñar unha nova ferramenta didáctica dirixida a aprendices de español. Por conseguinte, a investigación que presentamos corresponde aos seguintes tres obxectivos principais. En primeiro lugar, exploramos o uso colocacional de aprendices de ELE mediante un estudo de corpus de aprendices que se levou a cabo utilizando datos do corpus CEDEL2. Comparamos o uso de colocacións de aprendices ao de falantes nativos de español e, asemade, analizamos os erros colocacionais de aprendices. En segundo lugar, a tese examina o deseño e as funcionalidades de ferramentas didácticas existentes que poden ser aproveitados para a aprendizaxe de colocacións, como son os dicionarios de colocacións e ferramentas baseadas en datos de corpus. Máis especificamente, presentamos un experimento de usabilidade do Diccionario de colocaciones del español, así como un estudo que examina a destreza de aprendices de ELE na corrección de erros colocacionais autonomamente coa axuda de concordancias obtidas de corpus. En terceiro lugar, tendo en conta os resultados destes estudos, describimos o deseño dunha ferramenta en liña centrada en colocacións e destinada a aprendices de ELE