Errors specific to certain L1s

The researcher categorized the errors from specific L1 groups into different categorizations based on their language family. From the observation of the result above, two main phenomena, regarding L1 interferences, will be discussed in the following part.

Firstly, if we compare the frequent error types among these language families, it can be observed that Indo-European learners produced more deviant verbs (67%) while Altaic learners produced more deviant prepositions of verbs (57%) in the use of verb noun collocations, as provided in Table 4.27.

The deviant verbs made by Indo-European learners can be discussed from learners’

native languages. According to Kochmar (2011), the different lexical systems in these Indo-European languages lead to the misuse of certain verbs. Different verbs in English may have the same translation in other Indo-European languages. For instance, tell and say are both sagen in German, and decir in Spanish. In addition, Make and do are both machen in German. In this way, when these EFL learners produce verb noun collocations, it is very likely that they made deviant verb usages in collocation use.

As for learners of Altaic, it can be seen that they tend to make prepositional mistakes which usually are related to lack of prepositions in verb noun collocations. Explained from the perspective of L1, many verbs are not followed by prepositions in Japanese or Korean and thus learners are influenced by the rules in their native language and neglect the prepositions in certain verb noun collocates in English, which is also shown in the study of Tanimura, Takeuchi, and Isahara (2004). According to Tanimura et al. (2004), Japanese learners sometimes neglected prepositions after verbs because of L1 transfer. Take the verb

go in English for instance. The verb has certain meanings when followed by prepositions,

such as go to, go for, go on, go out, etc. in English while Japanese “iku” meaning go in English, has meaning without case markers, which can explain the phenomenon that Japanese learners neglect prepositions when using verb noun collocations.

Table 4.27 The most frequent types of collocation errors by different language families

Language Families The most frequent types

(the number of

frequent error types/ total error types)

Percentage(%)

Indo-European Deviant verbs (4/6) 67%

Altaic Deviant prepositions of verbs (4/7) 57%

Indo-European/Altaic Deviant prepositions of verbs (6/12) 50%

Altaic/Sino-Tibetan Deviant prepositions of verbs (3/5) 60%

Indo-European/Dravidian Deviant verbs (3/6) 50%

Altaic/Dravidian Deviant prepositions of verbs (2/3) 67%

Indo-European/Altaic/

Afro-Asiatic

Deviant verbs (2/5);

Deviant nouns (2/5)

40%

*Language families that only contain one error type are neglected.

Secondly, Koreans and Japanese seem to make the same mistakes quite often in the finding. Among 71 types of miscollocations made by Koreans, Japanese and both of the learners, 40.8% is shared by learners of both L1s (Appendix 2). It seems that Koreans and Japanese tend to make similar collocation errors quite often in English, which can be explained from the fact that they all belong to Altaic language and share certain elements in common in both languages.

Table 4.28 The number of errors made by Korean, Japanese or both learners Error types made by

Koreans, Japanese or both

Error types shared by both Percentage

71 29 40.8%

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

5.1 Summary of major findings

The present study discusses the cross-linguistic collocation errors shared by over six EFL learner groups and also specific errors shared by less than six groups, which are seldom explored by previous research. In addition, the innovative function of Sketch Engine, Sketch-Diff, is used to extract miscollocations among 11 languages in TOEFL 11. The source-tracing function also allows the researcher to discover the error distribution among these languages in order to find out universal and specific errors. With Sketch-Diff and its source-tracing function, it can save a lot of time and efforts to collect collocation errors in learner corpus, compared to the manual way and using concordance tool with manual inspection. The present research answers the following three research questions:

Q1: What are the verb noun miscollocations made frequently by eleven L1 groups of EFL learners?

Among 109 types of miscollocations, the frequent types of errors are divided into four categories, in which the frequent collocation errors contain the deviant use of agree, travel,

specialize, loose and do. The incorrect use of agree, travel and specialize is related to missing

prepositions. As for the verb loose, learners tend to confuse lose with loose because of their similar forms and a certain degree of shared meanings. Finally, concerning the delexical verb

do, learners tend to misuse the delexical verb, and have wrong assumption that they can freely

combine delexical verbs with any noun, which is attributed to the lack of specific meanings of delexical verbs.

Q2: What are the error types of these miscollocations?

The error types can be divided into four groups, including deviant verb usages, deviant prepositions of verbs, deviant noun usages and other types. Both deviant verb usages and deviant prepositions contain 46 error types, followed by deviant noun usages, comprising 13 types and 4 other types.

Q3: Among these miscollocations, what are the universal collocation errors shared by at least six L1 groups, and what are collocation errors made only by specific L1 groups?

There are 61 types of universal errors shared by over six L1 groups in TOEFL 11, including deviant verb usages (*do, *loose, *experiment, *try and *reach), deviant prepositions of verbs (*agree, *travel, *specialize, *listen, *search, *go and *participate), deviant noun usages (*sale) and others. These results showed the learners’ problems with delexical verbs, verbs sharing similar meaning and forms and lack of prepositions when using certain verbs.

Additionally, 48 specific errors shared by less than six L1 groups can be found with 15 types made by one language family, 26 by two language families and 7 by more than three language families. Indo-European language family tends to make more errors of deviant verbs while Altaic makes more errors of deviant prepositions. Besides, Korean and Japanese learners tend to make the same mistakes quite often in TOEFL 11, attributed to their similar L1 background.

5.2 Pedagogical Implications

From observing universal errors and specific errors found in TOEFL 11, the present study provides several pedagogical implications for teachers in EFL countries and especially for

teachers who might need to teach English to learners from various countries in the same class, such as sheltered English program. Several suggestions for learning and teaching verb noun collocations are illustrated as follows. First, the deviant use of delexical verb do seem universal for EFL learners in language learning. Thus, while teachers instruct verb noun collocations with delexical verbs, they should raise learners’ awareness toward the delexical verbs and remind them that delexical verbs can not be replaceable in collocation usages. For instance, we cannot replace make with do in make mistakes.

Second, the verbs sharing similar form and a certain degree of meaning seem confusing for EFL learners, such as “loose and lose” and “experience and experiment,” which are universal errors for EFL learners. Therefore, when teachers teach these vocabulary, they should supplement the other similar form and explain their differences in meanings, forms and usages, with L1 explanation if needed, which can decrease the possibility that they misuse the words in collocation use.

Third, sometimes learners making collocation mistakes is because they feel that they can interchange one word with its synonym and also the other way around. Take the universal errors, reach and achieve, in the present study for instance. They are synonyms which are used by learners interchangeably with collocations in TOEFL 11 since learners usually resort to Open Choice Principle (Sinclair, 1991). Teachers, thus, should pinpoint the fact that we should not interchange synonyms of word usages in some cases. If students have difficulty determining whether they can substitute the word with it synonyms, several online collocation-checking tools besides dictionaries can be introduced to them, such as Just the

Word and ForBetterEnglish.

Fourth, a great number of universal errors revealed in the present research are concerned about deviant prepositions of verbs, which are due to lack of prepositions in the result. Most previous studies attributed the mistakes to L1 interferences (Chen, 2002; Lin, 2010; Liu,

2013). However, since more than six L1 groups have made the errors, meaning that the possible reasons for the phenomenon is not totally L1-related. Instead, these might be the intralingual errors. Therefore, when instructors teach certain verbs, such as agree, specialize,

listen, search, participate, etc., their following prepositions must be emphasized by teachers

and can be practiced in drills to strengthen their memory.

Fifth, as can be seen in the result, learners sometimes confuse the words’ part of speech as in think/thought and sharp/sharpen. Teachers should raise students’ awareness of part of speech and provide various examples of words regarding different part of speech when teaching vocabulary. Besides, the meanings of gerunds and nouns are usually different, as in

advertising/advertisement. Learners’ unclear understanding of word meaning leads to

collocation errors accordingly. Teachers, thus, should remind students that the meaning of gerund is extended from its verb, whose meaning has subtle differences with its noun.

Finally, in terms of specific errors, it is found that Korean and Japanese learners tend to make the similar collocation mistakes; thus, for teachers in sheltered English programs, if they have both Korean and Japanese students in class, they should notice that these learners might have difficulty in the same collocation usages because of their shared language family.

In this way, when teachers instruct verb noun collocations to Japanese and Korean learners, they can take their L1 language background into account, and design and adjust their curriculums.

5.3 Limitations of the Present Study and Future Research

Although the present study provides some insights in universal and specific collocation errors and introduce an innovative method to utilize the Sketch-Diff, there are still some limitations of the present study. Some suggestions for future research are thus indicated.

First of all, since the definition of universal errors does not have a clear standard from previous research, the present study simply provides some insight in the universal errors shared by more than half L1 groups in TOEFL 11. It should be noticed that even though the present study sets the threshold of errors shared by six L1 groups as universal errors, errors made by five L1 groups can still possibly be universal errors in other kinds of context. Therefore, the definition of universal and specific errors should be seen as a continuum instead of the clear-cut polarity.

Second, the corpus of TOEFL 11 is not large enough, with approximately 3.8 million word tokens. Future research can replicate the present study at a larger scale in terms of word tokens and the number of L1s. In addition, other collocation types, such as adjective+noun, noun+verb, noun+noun, adverb+adjective and adverb+verb, can also be investigated in future studies to explore learner errors in different L1 groups.

Third, as indicated before, previous studies tend to explore collocation errors within one or two languages; thus, they usually attribute learners’ errors to L1 interferences. However, in the present research, it can be seen that several errors are shared by various languages and intralingual factors play an important role here. Although the present research tends to resort to learners’ ignorance of TL rules as an explanation of intralingual errors, as Ringbom (1998, p. 198) said, “ the relationship between transfer and possible universal learner language characteristics is too complex to allow more than a few tentative points to be made on the material so far available.” Therefore, the possible causes of these universal and intralingual errors still need more studies to further investigate.

Finally, with the plausible method to examine the cross-linguistic differences of collocation errors in the present study, future research can further adopt the source-tracing function of Sketch-Diff to investigate different variables, such as proficiency differences,

gender differences, age differences of learner production so as to offer pedagogical implications for both teachers and researchers.

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APPENDIX 1

Complete Verb Noun Collocation Errors (ranked alphabetically)

*Type A=Deviant verb usages; Type B= Deviant prepositions of verbs; Type C= Deviant noun usages; Type D=Others

No. Error Types

Collocation Errors

Suggested Forms Concordance Examples in TOEFL 11 A R

1 A *do adventure experience

adventure

This will allow him for greater success throughout the life as the elder have cross such limit they have no more spare time to do such enjoyment.

0 0 0 0 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 4

3 A *do

graduation

have graduation And the student who is doing graduation or undergraduation.

He requires all the three methods as he has to submit research papers on every subject.

0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 5 0 8

4 A *do mistakes make mistakes If the people having the capacity of understanding ideas there may be little chances to do the mistakes.

6 2 4 0 1 1 0 2 1 9 0 26

5 A *do have specialization It is better to do specialization in one particular subject of 0 0 1 0 0 4 0 0 0 26 0 31

specialization interest.

6 A *earn

knowledge

acquire knowledge In fact, it also could be fundamental to earn knowledge in politics, economics, art, music, every academics subjects that can help you to understand better the world.

0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 5

7 A *earn the facts learn the facts It should be more important for students to understand ideas and concept 8than it is for them to earn the facts.

0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 3

8 A *eat medicine take medicine Just eat this medicine ,everything will be OK . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 3

9 A *experiment

a culture

experience a culture Therefore, I think that the best way to travel is without a tour guide because it helps you to experiment a different culture,

0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 3

10 A *experiment

things

experience things Experimenting new things is very useful to have success 0 0 3 0 4 3 0 2 2 8 3 25

11 A *face

accidents

have accidents Moreover, when I face the traffic accident or disaster ,for example earthquake, My family get information immediately from the tour company.

0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 0 0 1 5

12 A *invent the

12 A *invent the

在文檔中 不同母語之英語學習者動名搭配詞錯誤分析 (頁 97-0)