Dra.

Encarnación Almazán Ruiz

Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

Corpus 2 (1º ESO): Student 5

I am using Error Taxonomy (Corder, 1967) to carry this analysis out.

a) Most common errors

● [Line 2]: “​men​”. It is an error because it is the plural form of the word ‘man’
and the student is referring to a single man, so it is not correct. This error is
due to the complexity of the target language, so I conclude that it is related to
intralingual factors​, more concretely to ​overgeneralization. ​Surely, the
student has been taught at some point how the plural form of ‘man’ is. We all
already knew that at this point of education (1º ​ESO​). Indeed, he or she is
using the third person singular for the verb ‘have’, so this student knows
perfectly what singulars and plurals are about. I may even think that it is an
occasional mistake rather than an error, but I would need to ask the student
directly about it to better know if he or she knew the rule and if he or she
would be able to self-correct or not.

● [Line 2]: “​has got a son​”. I may consider this part to be an error because of
the ​interference of the mother tongue; in this case Spanish (​interlingual
factors​). ‘To have a son’ is totally correct, but what this student is doing, I
think, is directly translating ‘​tener un hijo’;​ ​hijo​=son. I think that he is using
this phrase not because he consciously knows that it is correct but because
of direct translation from Spanish. Anyway, I would need to assess the given
student so as to really know if he or she knows that either ‘to have a child’ or
‘to have a son’ may be used. What is for sure is that the phrase ‘to have a
child’ is much more common than the other one, and it has much more
results on the website. It is for this reason that I may be not considering the
student to be using a less used phrase to say that rather than using the most
common and general way (having in mind his/her level), but it is only a
personal appreciation. ​If I stick to the text itself the student is not making an
error at all.

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

● [Line 3]: “​The son is five years ago​”. It could be an error owing to the
complexity of the language so, it would be an ​intralingual ​error. The student
has ​overgeneralized the use of the adverb of time ‘ago’, and he or she has
not learnt yet that the correct word here would be ‘old’. It has happened
probably because he/she is used to listening to that when storytelling takes
place, for example, since many of the stories begin with expressions and
phrases such as ‘many years ago’ or ‘a long time ago’, and probably this
student has associated these expressions, working as a routine, with the
word ‘years’.

● [Line 5]: “​He plays, he dances he eats every day​”. Here we have either a
punctuation mistake and we need one more comma, or an ​intralingual error
(​simplification​) and we need the conjunction ‘and’ to mark a succession of
equal grammatical elements (“He plays, he dances and he eats every day”).

● [Line 5]: “​A day, they go to Mcdonals​”. ​It is probably an error due to
intralingual factors. ‘A day’ is used when we want to express how many
times we do something during the whole day, or the whole week, or
whatever. E.g.: Brush your teeth at least twice a day. It is common to use
‘one day’ when meaning a particular time, but we do not know or it does not
matter when, so the correct form here would be ‘one day’; it is used as a
collocation when telling stories, for example. I would probably state that this
is an ​overgeneralization of the indefinite article because it is taught at this
stage of education. The student knows the rule, he or she knows that before
a consonant sound he/she should use the indefinite article ‘a’, and he/she
has overgeneralized this to ‘count’ things. It can be also an ​induced error if
the teacher has not explained the uses and differences between ‘a’ and
‘one’, but I am not able to know it with certainty. Besides, ‘Mcdonals’ can be
simply a spelling mistake concerning the apostrophe. The student probably
knows how it is because he/she has seen the image of the company
numberless, and he/she could self-correct, but also, I think that this contains
an error due to ​interlingual interference​; it is written as it sounds in

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

Spanish. It can also be due to an ​intralingual ​simplification due to the

complexity of the word itself.

● [Lines 10, 11, 12]: “​The child hasn’t shower​”, “​The child has shower​”.
They are ​intralingual errors because the student has not used the verb
‘shower’ in its past form. It is an ​overgeneralization of the chunk ‘to have a
shower’. The child knows how to use the past and the third person singular,
but he/she has brought here the collocation ‘have a shower’. I mean, he/she
uses correctly the third person singular in the text, but I think that it is, along
with the errors, mostly devoted to routines and open formulas (“A men ​has
got a son”, “I ​liked​…”, “I ​didn’t ​like​…”). This exemplification is if I take into
account that the student has used ‘shower’ as a verb. If we think that he is
using the phrase ‘have a shower’, we also may think that he/she is omitting
the present perfect form ‘has had a shower’. Anyway, this student knows
about the third person singular, but he/she has not managed to also inflect
the verb ‘to shower’ (‘The child hasn’t showered’). I also think that it can be
due to the Spanish interference, taking into account that we say ​“El niño se
ha duchado”,​ it is probable too that this learner had this in mind when writing
this (interlingual-interference).

● [Line 11]: “​At school tell him what his son hasn’t shower​”. We can
observe here an ​interlingual error due to Spanish ​interference (‘​En la
escuela le dicen que…’​). The student has omitted the subject ‘they’, and it is
needed in English to nail the subject of the action, whereas in Spanish we
tend to omit it many times. Into the bargain, the learner has ​overgeneralized
(​intralingual​) the use of ‘what’ here, probably because one of the first
sentences that an English learner learns is ‘what do you want?’. The correct
word is the conjunction ‘that’, to start the new part of the sentence.

● [Line 13]: “​I liked because the child is very fanny​”. Firstly, the learner is
omitting the pronoun ‘it’ that refers to the film. It also occurs in the following
line: “I didn’t like because the dad is very bad”. Having the learner committing

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

the same error twice gives us clues that it is really an error and he/she is not
able to self-correct. It is an ​interlingual​ error (​interference​) since we do not

need a pronoun in this case in Spanish (‘​Me gustó (la película) porque…’)​.
Secondly, we have a ​simplification in ‘fanny’. It is a spelling mistake that I
think is connected with the transparent nature of Spanish, inasmuch as this
is a language that is read as it is written. So, the student has deeded the
word as it is pronounced.

● [Line 14]: “​I didn’t like because the dad is very bad​”. Here we find the
same error as the previous one in which the learner has omitted the pronoun
‘it’ (​interlingual, interference​). Apart from that, I think that, possibly, ‘bad’ is
not the best option to use here. At this stage of education, ‘bad’ is one of the
first adjectives that learners learn (good and bad). This student has learnt
that ‘bad’ is used for bad things and he/she has probably ​overgeneralized
this (​intralingual error​). Although it is not lexically wrong, it would be better
to say that he is not good at being a father. I have watched this film and he is
not bad at all, I mean, he does not behave badly or evilly as can be
understood in the text, it is rather that he is more a friend than a father for the
child.

b) Analysis of morphemes, questions, and negative patterns

Interlanguage has a selection of features that set the learning path of

learners of a second language. We find two main stages into which interlanguage is
divided. We are dealing here with the second one, the general route of
developmental patterns​. Three processes are studied in this section:

1. Morpheme studies

In this fragment, I can notice that the learner manages ​word order in simple
declarative sentences. E.g. ‘My favourite film is “Un papá genial”. Here we can see
a clear complex sentence structure SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), and therefore this

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

student is probably beyond the first set of target patterns; I am going to illustrate it:
concerning the second stage of patterns, the student has already learnt how to use
singular copula ​(‘s/is), e.g. ‘He’s very naughty’, ‘...the dad is very bad’. I cannot

mark here singular or plural auxiliaries or the progressive -ing form. I do not know if
it is because the student has not considered these aspects in this text, or perhaps
because he/she has not acquired this knowledge yet. I think that this learner has
not reached yet the fourth set of target patterns because he is not using any of the
aspects it contains, at least in a correct way (perfect auxiliary (have-en) and past
part). So, I conclude that he/she is at the third set because this learner uses at least
part of this stage, which is the third person singular -s (‘The child cries’, ‘He plays,
he dances…’).

2. Questions

We can not distinguish questions development in this sample. It is not proper

to analyse it.

3. Negative patterns

According to negatives development, I can set the learner within the fourth
stage since he/she is using the internal correct negation with auxiliary (​analysed​):
e.g. ‘I didn’t like...’. The learner uses the third person singular for negation in ‘The
child hasn’t shower’; although the tense is not well executed, we can draw that this
particular student knows about how negation is formed. ‘I didn’t like’ would be
another example of a correct negation.

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

Corpus 4 (Oral): Student 5

c) ​Analysis of learners’ strategies. (Dörnyei & Scott’s Taxonomy)

Communication strategies are the tools that learners use to communicate by

means of verbal or nonverbal mechanisms. Some of the strategies are more useful
to learn about the language itself than others. For example, if the student abandons
the message and he or she does not receive feedback because he/she has been
understood even with mistakes, he or she will not be able to correct him/herself.

Anyway, here I am going to analyze a given text from a learner, without

taking into account if the strategies he/she is using will lead him/her to analytic
knowledge success.
In the text, we find first a Spanish ‘transcription’ of the ‘interlanguage’ text. It
is almost necessary to better understand the learner’s text (some parts of it are not
quite well understandable).
The methodology I am going to use will be to list the communication
strategies that appear in this sample and provide concrete illustrative examples.

➢ Self-repair (16a):

● [Line 1]: “-​Once upon a time one- two people the husband and the
wife​…”.

Here it is noticeable that the learner self-initiates the correction in

his/her own speech when talking about the number of people involved in the story.
This student is probably using ‘one’ because he/she is confused about the use of
the word ‘people’, which sounds to be singular for us Spanish speakers. Then,
he/she immediately repairs it and says ‘two’ instead of ‘one’. So, this student is
using this strategy here to communicate as effectively and accurately as possible.

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

● [Line 3]: “...​and see- saw the UFO​…”.

When the learner uses the present simple of the verb ‘see’, he/she
corrects him/herself and prefers to use the past simple.

● [Line 9]: “...​the police metieron to the woman- the wife to the
prison-​”.

➢ Use of fillers (20);

● [Line 1]: “...​the husband and the wife eh they live​…”.

“Eh” is a gambit used to fill pauses so as to gain time in order to think

and restructure the message and to maintain discourse.

● [Line 4]: “...​and the dog eh she rang​…”.

Here we have exactly the same example as the previous one. The
use of that filler so as to keep the communication channel by means of gaining
some time to think.

➢ Restructuring (8):

● [Lines 1,2]: “...​the husband and the wife eh they live in a small
house​…”.

We can find here, after the use of a filler, a change in the structure.
The learner is telling about one aspect of the couple, then he/she makes a pause
filled by ‘eh’, and then he/she restructures the execution of his/her verbal plan so as
to communicate the intended messages.

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

● [Lines 4,5]: “...​the garden and the dog eh she rang the doctor​…”.

Here the learner is clearly using the same strategy as in the previous
example. It makes me see clearly that this certain structure is indeed a
communicative strategy since it is repeated in exactly the same manner.

➢ Omission (14):

● [Lines 2,3]: “...​the husband wake up and through to the window​…”.

Probably the student does not know how it is the correct verb to use
here, so he/she uses a communication strategy, leaves a gap, and continues as if it
had been said. We need the verb ‘to look’ between the conjunction ‘and’ and the
preposition ‘through’ (‘...and looks through the window…’).

● [Lines 3,4]: “...​he wake up the wife and through to the window​…”.

It is exactly the same example and the same structure as the previous
one. This learner tends to use more than once the same communicative strategies,
and in the same structures.

➢ Mumbling (13):

● [Line 6]: “...​((pausa breve)) mmm lo contó si the man mmmm si

((pausa))​”.

We can see here two examples of mumbling (“mmm”). Probably, the

learner is also trying to restructure the message because he/she makes several
pauses and hesitations by means of mumbling.

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

➢ Code-switching (language switch) (11):

● [Line 6]: “...​lo contó si the man mmmm si​…”.

The learner includes L1 words with L1 pronunciation in L2 speech (“lo

contó”, “si”).

● [Lines 8,9]: “-​She ve an UFO and he que ‘no the UFO no exist’ and
the doctor y the police metieron​…”.

It is full of code-switching strategy. It seems that the learner is tired of

thinking in English and at the end of the text he has almost given up to use his/her
native language to be able to finish the speech anyway (“ve”, “no”, “metieron”).

➢ Message abandonment (1):

● [Line 6]: “...​mmm lo contó si the man mmmm si ((pausa))​”.

The child leaves the message unfinished because of language

difficulty.

➢ Literal translation (transfer) (9):

● [Line 8]: “...​and he ‘que no the UFO no exist’​...”.

Previously, I have considered these ‘no’ as Spanish words within the

section of code-switching. But I can also consider them to be English words, and in
this case, a structure from L1 is literally translated to L2: ‘​y él (el marido): -Que no,
el OVNI no existe’​ as a base for: ‘no the UFO no exist’, so it would probably also be
a transfer from Spanish (a negative one).

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

➢ Indirect appeal for help (24b):

● [Line 6]: “...​((pausa breve)) mmm lo contó si the man mmmm si

((pausa))​”.

Here we have several strategies mixed at the same time. It is a clue

for us to know that the learner must be in trouble. The final pause comes before a
question that the interlocutor makes to the learner to help him/her continue. I can
imagine that the child must be expressing a lack of needed L2 items nonverbally
too, as for example, shrugging the shoulders. Besides, on lines 8 and 9, this student
might be indirectly asking for help too, since he/she is constantly using
code-switching, self-repair…

➢ Self-repetition (21a):

● [Line 5]: “...​she rang the doctor and the police and the doctor and
the police​…”.

The child is repeating the string of words immediately after they were
said, instead of simply saying ‘they’, for example.

d) ​Analysis of formulaic language: open/closed formulas

In the text, the very first item that we find is a ​closed formula or routine
which has been probably memorized as a chunk of storytelling language because it
might be beyond the learner’s level (the learner utters it in one go). It is in line 1:
“Once upon a time…”. I noticed also, in line 1, the routine “one day”. Concerning
routines, learners use them without being analytical about the language. This child,
for sure, does not know about ‘once upon a time’ if we give him/her the different
parts of it separated, as for example, the preposition ‘upon’.

Moreover, an ​open formula ​is present in the transcript: ‘in a + NP’ (line 2: “in
a small house). The learner is able to use it as needed, by means of changing the

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

last part of the formula, so this open chunk allows some choice on the learner’s part
(“in a small house”, “in a big park”, “in a beautiful country”, etc.).

Conclusion

I would like to point out some aspects of these learners’ language: the first
example shows us differences from the first practice we carried out. It is dealing
with L2 acquisition and, as such, we can not take into account a Mean Lenght of
Utterance (MLU), so we would have to analyze it from the point of view of formulas,
routines, etc. Something that has shocked me is the variation among all the
classmates when doing the practice together in Google Meet sessions. Many times
we did not coincide at some points of the analysis, which makes me think that,
probably, what happens in a research study is not going to happen in another
different one; the results may not concur. All of this, I think, is due to the huge

amount of factors that affect the learning process and the learner’s speech (the
linguistic context, the situational one, the psycholinguistic context of the learner,
etc.). Most of the errors here are overt since I could underline them. This student
commits errors from different types: sentence errors, category errors (spelling,
syntax…). To conclude, I think that it is an arduous process to fathom learners’
corpora. I have already mentioned in the specific analysis of this student all the
issues I want to deal with.

In the case of the second student, I think that many of the strategies that he
or she is using are not going to really help him/her learning and progressing. If
these errors do not receive a proper correction the learner may fossilize. There are
some parts on the transcript in which there are covert errors that I could not
underline. The discourse sometimes is incoherent, but this student is able to
self-correct so that here we can find not only errors but also mistakes.

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 Dra. Encarnación Almazán Ruiz
Alejandro Jesús Sánchez López
Práctica 2- Lingüística aplicada a la Enseñanza del Inglés

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