This essay studies the written performance of 43 Swedish junior high school students. Relative clauses, prepositional usage and subject-verb agreement are studied and analysed in order to see what and how many errors the students make and then finally to see if there is any difference in the performance of boys and girls. Previous research in the area has shown an advantage in favour of girls and this study confirmed this. Even though the differences were not marked, the girls performed better than the boys in the majority of the cases studied. The data further indicated that there is great variation within the gender groups as well as between them.

This paper is a study of the noun phrase construction in L2 learner language and the base for the study are the tools for measuring syntactic maturity presented by Kellog W. Hunt (1966). Hunt and other scholars have used T-units, the smallest terminable unit in language, to analyze L2 learner language. This study however, analyzes the construction of the noun phrase instead of T-units. Although the focus differs there are many similarities between the method used in this study and in those analyzing T-units. This means that the study tries to create indexes which we can use as tools for measuring syntactic maturity and complexity among L2 learners, by measuring consolidation and postmodification. The outcome of the study shows that it is possible to measure consolidation of the noun phrase and that this figure may very well function as a tool for measuring language development. Furthermore this paper investigates opportunities for teachers to teach syntax and concludes that there are ways of improving L2 teaching by utilizing knowledge about L2 learner syntax.

Disertacijoje aprašomas gretinamasis leksinių samplaikų tyrimas lietuvių gimtosios kalbos vartotojų ir gimtakalbių anglų kalbos vartotojų rašytinėje anglų kalboje. Tyrime naudoti trys skirtingų kalbos mokėjimo lygių vartotojų anglų kalbos tekstynai: pirmakursių studentų ir vyresniųjų kursų studentų, kurių gimtoji kalba – lietuvių, rašiniai, bei anglų gimtosios kalbos vartotojų, t. y. įvairių Didžiosios Britanijos ir JAV universitetų studentų rašiniai. Leksinių samplaikų struktūrinė analizė parodė, jog žemesnio mokėjimo lygio mokinių kalboje dažniau pasitaiko veiksmažodinių samplaikų, o aukštesnio lygio mokinių kalboje – vardažodinių. Tai rodo, jog žemesnio mokėjimo lygio mokinių kalba artimesnė sakytinei anglų kalbai, kuriai būdingos veiksmažodinės leksinės samplaikos. Kylant kalbos mokėjimo lygiui, mokinių rašytinėje kalboje randasi daugiau vardažodinių leksinių samplaikų, kurios dažnesnės rašytiniame diskurse. Funkcinė leksinių samplaikų analizė atskleidė, jog kylant mokinių kalbos mokėjimo lygiui nuosekliai kinta ir tam tikrų kalbos funkcijų raiška: žemesnio lygio mokiniai daugiau dėmesio skiria diskurso organizavimo ir autoriaus pozicijos raiškai, o aukštesnio lygio mokinių kalboje dažnesni referentiniai pasakymai, perteikiantys teksto propozicinį turinį. Leksinių samplaikų analizė pagal jose realizuojamus frazinius junginius atskleidė lietuvių gimtosios kalbos vartotojams būdingų frazinių junginių vartojimo ypatumų. Tyrimo išvados ir taikomoji vertė siejamos su anglų... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The study presents a contrastive analysis of learner language which is represented by written English of the Lithuanian EFL learners and native speakers of English. The material for the study comes from three corpora of learner language: two Lithuanian corpora consist of student essays written by first-year students and third-/fourth-year students of English Philology while the native speaker corpus is a selection of argumentative essays from the LOCNESS corpus. The study involves structural and functional analyses of lexical bundles retrieved from the three corpora. The findings of the study show that written English produced by the learners of the lower proficiency levels bears more features typical of spoken English. As the level of proficiency increases, the number of verbal bundles gives way to bundles incorporating noun and prepositional phrases which are more characteristic of the written variety of the language. As regards the distribution of lexical bundles across the functional types, the study proves that the Lithuanian learners pay more attention to discourse organization and expression of stance while in the native speaker material the proportion of referential lexical bundles, used to express propositions, is much more prominent. The study also involves an analysis of phrasal expressions recurring in the lexical bundles. The conclusions and implications of the research may be particularly useful to the practice of ELT/EFL in Lithuania while certain insights of... [to full text]

The study presents a contrastive analysis of learner language which is represented by written English of the Lithuanian EFL learners and native speakers of English. The material for the study comes from three corpora of learner language: two Lithuanian corpora consist of student essays written by first-year students and third-/fourth-year students of English Philology while the native speaker corpus is a selection of argumentative essays from the LOCNESS corpus. The study involves structural and functional analyses of lexical bundles retrieved from the three corpora. The findings of the study show that written English produced by the learners of the lower proficiency levels bears more features typical of spoken English. As the level of proficiency increases, the number of verbal bundles gives way to bundles incorporating noun and prepositional phrases which are more characteristic of the written variety of the language. As regards the distribution of lexical bundles across the functional types, the study proves that the Lithuanian learners pay more attention to discourse organization and expression of stance while in the native speaker material the proportion of referential lexical bundles, used to express propositions, is much more prominent. The study also involves an analysis of phrasal expressions recurring in the lexical bundles. The conclusions and implications of the research may be particularly useful to the practice of ELT/EFL in Lithuania while certain insights of... [to full text] / Disertacijoje aprašomas gretinamasis leksinių samplaikų tyrimas lietuvių gimtosios kalbos vartotojų ir gimtakalbių anglų kalbos vartotojų rašytinėje anglų kalboje. Tyrime naudoti trys skirtingų kalbos mokėjimo lygių vartotojų anglų kalbos tekstynai: pirmakursių studentų ir vyresniųjų kursų studentų, kurių gimtoji kalba – lietuvių, rašiniai, bei anglų gimtosios kalbos vartotojų, t. y. įvairių Didžiosios Britanijos ir JAV universitetų studentų rašiniai. Leksinių samplaikų struktūrinė analizė parodė, jog žemesnio mokėjimo lygio mokinių kalboje dažniau pasitaiko veiksmažodinių samplaikų, o aukštesnio lygio mokinių kalboje – vardažodinių. Tai rodo, jog žemesnio mokėjimo lygio mokinių kalba artimesnė sakytinei anglų kalbai, kuriai būdingos veiksmažodinės leksinės samplaikos. Kylant kalbos mokėjimo lygiui, mokinių rašytinėje kalboje randasi daugiau vardažodinių leksinių samplaikų, kurios dažnesnės rašytiniame diskurse. Funkcinė leksinių samplaikų analizė atskleidė, jog kylant mokinių kalbos mokėjimo lygiui nuosekliai kinta ir tam tikrų kalbos funkcijų raiška: žemesnio lygio mokiniai daugiau dėmesio skiria diskurso organizavimo ir autoriaus pozicijos raiškai, o aukštesnio lygio mokinių kalboje dažnesni referentiniai pasakymai, perteikiantys teksto propozicinį turinį. Leksinių samplaikų analizė pagal jose realizuojamus frazinius junginius atskleidė lietuvių gimtosios kalbos vartotojams būdingų frazinių junginių vartojimo ypatumų. Tyrimo išvados ir taikomoji vertė siejamos su anglų... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

The present compilation thesis investigates the use of a pattern that is commonly found in academic writing, namely the introductory it pattern (e.g. it is interesting to note the difference). The main aim is to shed further light on the formal and functional characteristics of the pattern in academic writing. When relevant, the thesis also investigates functionally related constructions. The focus is on learner use, but reference corpora of published writing and non-native-speaker student writing have also been utilized for comparison. The thesis encompasses an introductory survey (a “kappa”) and four articles. The material comes from six different corpora: ALEC, BATMAT, BAWE, LOCRA, MICUSP and VESPA. Factors such as native-speaker status, discipline, level of achievement (lower-graded vs. higher-graded texts) and level of expertise in academic writing are investigated in the articles. In more detail, Articles 1 and 2 examine the formal (syntactic) characteristics of the introductory it pattern. The pattern is studied using modified versions of two previous syntactic classifications. Articles 3 and 4 investigate the functional characteristics of the pattern. In Article 3, a functional classification is developed and used to categorize the instances. Article 4 examines the stance-marking function of the pattern in relation to functionally related constructions (e.g. stance adverbs such as possibly and stance noun + prepositional phrase combinations like the possibility of). The introductory it pattern was found to be relatively invariable in the sense that a small set of formal and functional realizations made up the bulk of the tokens. The learners, especially those whose texts received a lower grade, made particularly frequent use of high-frequency realizations of the pattern. The thesis highlights the importance of not limiting investigations of this kind to comparisons across native-speaker status, as this is only one of the several factors that can influence the distribution. By exploring the potential importance of many different factors from both a formal and a functional perspective, the thesis paints a more complete picture of the introductory it pattern in academic writing, of use in, for instance, second-language instruction.

The aim of the thesis is to propose a tagging system for a learner corpus of spoken English which would, apart from tagging errors, focus also on the features specific for spoken language. Theoretical part, therefore, introduces basic concepts including learner language, the development of learner corpora in the last 20 years and both classical and computer-aided error analysis. Features typical of spoken language are described in the theoretical part as well since these are the focus of the research part of the thesis. The Louvain tagging system used for error-tagging of a leaner corpus of written language is used as the basis for the tagging system proposed in this thesis. Based on the analysis of 20 transcriptions taken from the Czech part of spoken learner corpus LINDSEI, modifications of the categories taken from the Louvain error-tagging system are proposed and new categories necessary for a better description of spoken language are introduced. The tagging system proposed in this thesis should make further analysis of the tagged corpus easier.

The thesis analyses syntactic complexity of monologic tasks of 10 B2 and 10 C1 speakers of English with Czech as their L1. The data derives from LINDSEI_CZ (Gráf 2017). The transcripts of the recordings were segmented into AS-units (Foster et al. 2000) and adapted for the purposes of the analysis. Syntactic complexity was calculated using following measures: mean length of AS-unit, mean length of clause, clauses / AS-unit. These were complemented by fine-grained indices of structural complexity, comprised of ratios of subordinate clause types and coordinate verb phrases per total number of clauses (Vercellotti & Packer 2016) and a weighted complexity scale designed by Vercellotti (2018). The results of the quantitative analysis showed no significant effect of proficiency on syntactic complexity of the speakers. In fact, all speakers irrespective of language proficiency level produced very similar complex structures as opposed to lower-proficiency structures. This indicates that more fine-grained indices should be incorporated into spoken complexity research. At the same time, scores of each measure varied considerably within groups, pointing at the importance of inter-speaker variability in this research. The thesis thus produced outcomes that are largely methodological, in that it has identified...

In the present study, the linguistic performance of 11 Swedish high-school students of Spanish as second language (L2)/foreign language (FL) of 3 different levels, between 16-18 years old, has been measured through analysis of experimental elicited speech samples from a picture description task, designed to elicit placement of adjectives and dimensional adjectives in Spanish. The task provided 3 images with phrases in the source language and the participants were asked to translate it into the target language (TL). Subsequently, 9 images without text were presented and the students were asked to describe the images in the TL. The intention was to measure the grammatical accuracy concerning the placement of adjectives and the possible transfer –from Swedish to Spanish– of semantical markers regarding dimensional adjectives. The results from the performance analysis of the learners responses indicate that in beginner learners of Spanish, the semantic markers of dimensional adjectives have been transferred from Swedish to Spanish. One example that reflects this is the predominant use of the form largo ‘long’ instead of alto ’high/tall’ regarding the height of a person. The beginners also exhibit transfer in the placement of adjectives. These types of errors found in the speech of beginner students were not salient to the same extent in more advanced students.

Tato práce se zabývá neformální výukou anglického jazyka dospělých. Pojednává o motivačních prvcích v jazykovém vzdělávání a jak je na motivační strukturu ve výuce anglického jazyka nahlíženo učiteli a jejich studenty. Cílem práce bylo prozkoumat motivační citlivost učitelů v tzv. one-to-one jazykových firemních kurzech a jaké motivační strategie v těchto kurzech učitelé využívají. Teoretická část této práce se zabývá pozadím tématiky vzdělávání dospělých a praktická čast práce se skládá ze dvou částí - dotazníkového šetření a pozorování výuky.

The diploma thesis is concerned with the analysis of recurrent word-combinations in the speech of advanced Czech speakers of English and native speakers of English. The data used for the analysis is extracted from two corpora, learner corpus LINDSEI and native speaker corpus LOCNEC. The aim of the thesis is to compare the two groups of speakers, determine differences in their use of recurrent word-combinations and compare the findings to previous studies involving speakers of different languages. The quantitative analysis is performed on a sample of 50 speakers from each corpus and the frequency data is used to compare the two groups as to the number of types of word-combinations they use and how frequently they do so. The qualitative analysis is performed on a sample of 15 speakers from each corpus to determine functional differences. Four categories of word-combinations are determined in the analysis. In the conclusion, the quantitative and qualitative findings are compared to previous research involving speakers of different languages. Keywords: spoken language, learner language, n-grams, n-gram analysis, recurrent word- combinations, lexical bundles, learner corpus