Search

An extensive number of corrective feedback (CF) studies have examined learners' errors with grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling (non-formulaic forms) and established an association between learners' uptake of CF and their second language development. However, learners' errors with formulaic sequences (FSs) comprising idioms, collocations, lexical bundles, and compounds (formulaic forms) have received scant attention in CF research. This study investigated any associations among formulaic vs. non-formulaic errors, CF types, uptake, and successful uptake rate by drawing on the audio-recordings of 36 hours of primarily meaning-oriented teacher–learner interactions in three advanced English as a foreign language classes. The findings demonstrated that learners made more errors with FSs, whereas CF was provided significantly more often for their non-formulaic errors. Learners' non-formulaic and formulaic errors were treated significantly more frequently through recasts and elicitations, respectively. Uptake and successful uptake rate was significantly higher when CF was provided for learners' formulaic errors than non-formulaic ones, which could be explained by relatively greater saliency, significance, and noticeability of FSs. The findings of log-linear analyses indicated that uptake and successful uptake rate varied depending on formulaic vs. non-formulaic foci of errors and CF types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that learners’ performance in mathematics in under-resourced secondary schools in South Africa is poor. However, little is known about the performance of learners in top-performing well-resourced secondary schools apart from their good results in Grade 12. In this study, the performance of Grade 9 learners in top-performing quintile 5 (i.e. well-resourced) schools was compared with that of learners in quintile 1–3 (i.e. poorly resourced) schools using a 45-item test. While the quintile 5 learners obtained higher test scores, the performance pattern across the test items was very similar for both quintile groupings. A detailed error analysis of 89 quintile 5 learners’ responses to equation items revealed difficulties in applying the standard equation-solving procedure, and in operating with negatives and subtraction, particularly on like terms. These problems may be related to a poorly conceived curriculum in the areas of integers and equations. It is recommended that Grade 8 and 9 teachers pay regular attention to all four arithmetic operations on integers. Furthermore, the teaching of equations should give greater attention to the cognitive shifts required in solving equations with letters on both sides of the equal sign. Significance: • Learner performance patterns on a test were similar for learners from top-performing quintile 5 schools and learners from lower quintile schools, although the quintile 5 learners obtained higher test scores. • Quintile 5 learners’ ability to solve linear equations correctly is substantially impacted by their difficulties in simplifying two algebraic terms to a single term, particularly when negatives and/or subtraction are involved. • Particular aspects of the curriculum may partly be responsible for the difficulties learners experience with integers and equations.

It is well known that learners' performance in mathematics in under-resourced secondary schools in South Africa is poor. However, little is known about the performance of learners in top-performing wellresourced secondary schools apart from their good results in Grade 12. In this study, the performance of Grade 9 learners in top-performing quintile 5 (i.e. well-resourced) schools was compared with that of learners in quintile 1--3 (i.e. poorly resourced) schools using a 45-item test. While the quintile 5 learners obtained higher test scores, the performance pattern across the test items was very similar for both quintile groupings. A detailed error analysis of 89 quintile 5 learners' responses to equation items revealed difficulties in applying the standard equation-solving procedure, and in operating with negatives and subtraction, particularly on like terms. These problems may be related to a poorly conceived curriculum in the areas of integers and equations. It is recommended that Grade 8 and 9 teachers pay regular attention to all four arithmetic operations on integers. Furthermore, the teaching of equations should give greater attention to the cognitive shifts required in solving equations with letters on both sides of the equal sign. Significance: * Learner performance patterns on a test were similar for learners from top-performing quintile 5 schools and learners from lower quintile schools, although the quintile 5 learners obtained higher test scores. * Quintile 5 learners' ability to solve linear equations correctly is substantially impacted by their difficulties in simplifying two algebraic terms to a single term, particularly when negatives and/or subtraction are involved. * Particular aspects of the curriculum may partly be responsible for the difficulties learners experience with integers and equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews published research on South African learner corpora, focussing on available corpora and a synthesis of research themes and findings. Previous corpora for English amount to 4.2 million words of undergraduate writing and 1.85 million words for Afrikaans. Research yielded findings on cohesion, coherence, metadiscourse, grammatical features, vocabulary, spelling errors, and learner errors. Cross-cutting trends indicate the overuse of high frequency functional categories and high frequency lexical resources, and similarities between student writing and spoken conversation. Overall, this article documents the sizable body of research that has been conducted to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current syntactic annotation of large-scale learner corpora mainly resorts to “standard parsers” trained on native language data. Understanding how these parsers perform on learner data is important for downstream research and application related to learner language. This study evaluates the performance of multiple standard probabilistic parsers on learner English. Our contributions are three-fold. Firstly, we demonstrate that the common practice of constructing a gold standard – by manually correcting the pre-annotation of a single parser – can introduce bias to parser evaluation. We propose an alternative annotation method which can control for the annotation bias. Secondly, we quantify the influence of learner errors on parsing errors, and identify the learner errors that impact on parsing most. Finally, we compare the performance of the parsers on learner English and native English. Our results have useful implications on how to select a standard parser for learner English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that learner performance in mathematics in South Africa is poor. However, less is known about what learners actually do and the extent to which this changes as they move through secondary school mathematics. In this study a cohort of 250 learners was tracked from Grade 9 to Grade 11 to investigate changes in their performance on a diagnostic algebra test drawn from the well-known Concepts in Secondary Maths and Science (CSMS) tests. Although the CSMS tests were initially developed for Year 8 and Year 9 learners in the UK, a Rasch analysis on the Grade 11 results showed that the test performed adequately for older learners in SA. Error analysis revealed that learners make a wide variety of errors even on simple algebra items. Typical errors include conjoining, difficulties with negatives and brackets and a tendency to evaluate expressions rather than leaving them in the required open form. There is substantial evidence of curriculum impact in learners’ responses such as the inappropriate application of the addition law of exponents and the distributive law. Although such errors dissipate in the higher grades, this happens later than expected. While many learner responses do not appear to be sensible initially, interview data reveals that there is frequently an underlying logic related to mathematics that has been previously learned.

Signalling nouns are nouns which have cohesive properties across and within clauses. A signalling noun is potentially any abstract noun the full meaning of which can only be made specific by reference to its context. Examples of nouns which can function as signalling nouns are attitude, assistance, difficulty, endurance, process, reason, result etc. Signalling nouns in discourse are closely associated with nominalisation and are problematic for learners. Based on a corpus of argumentative essays written by Cantonese L1 learners of English, this paper presents a taxonomy of error types and frequency data of the different error types in the use of signalling nouns. The paper then compares the average number of signalling nouns used per essay with grades awarded to the essays, on the one hand, and the numbers of signalling noun errors according to grades, on the other. In both cases there is a significant correlation. The findings confirm the intuitive idea that the use of signalling nouns adds to the overall coherence of a text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]