Brain, Digital, & Learning

 Open access, Peer Reviewed

Indexed in KCI

pISSN 2384-2474
eISSN 2586-7490

RESEARCH ARTICLE

A Corpus-Based Study on Korean High School Students’ Common Errors in English Writing

1Incheon Shinhyeon High School
2Korea National University of Education

Correspondence to Dong Ju Lee, maydjlee@knue.ac.kr

Brain, Digital, & Learning. Volume 13, Number 4, 397–414, December 2023. https://doi.org/10.31216/BDL.20230025
Received on October 18, 2023, Revised on December 4, 2023, Accepted on December 4, 2023, Published on December 31, 2023.
Copyright © 2023. Institute of Brain based Education, Korea National University of Education This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the common errors in writing production made by Korean high school students. It aims to provide information on the areas that Korean high school students need to develop and to inform their educational needs. For this, high school students’ writing samples were collected and built into a learner corpus named Shinhyeon Corpus of High school Learners’ English Essays (SCOHLEE). The study identified frequent errors produced by the high school students adopting a computer-aided error analysis (CEA) technique using the Louvain Error Tagging Manual, and quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted by using corpus tools (AntConc 4.0). The results revealed that a total of 3,368 errors were categorized into 7 major categories and 47 sub-categories, with article errors (GA) produced the most. Regarding English proficiency, mid-level learners produced a higher rate of errors and a wider range of error types. Additionally, the study showed a significant increase in the frequency of punctuation errors in the second semester. Overall, this study has pedagogical implications for lexis, grammar and writing instruction and the provision of error correction.
Keywords

Learner corpus, error tagging, CEA, frequent errors, writing instruction

Section