Comparing Error Tagged Learner Corpora and Learners’ Variables

Katerina Florou 
(University of Athens, Greece)

Abstract: Learner Corpora have recently become an important source of data in second language acquisition studies and the main interests of researchers evolve around the differences between native and non-native linguistic system (Lenko-Szymanska, 2006, p. 87). The research that is being described in this paper refers to the age of the Greek learners of the Italian language and the errors that are made. The results of such research have important implications for L2 writing instruction.
    In Greece, Italian is taught as a second or third language; for that reason the students are mostly adults. Most educators believe that there is an interrelation of the age and the number of errors that may occur in written production; fewer mistakes are likely to be found in texts of younger students rather than in those of the older ones. This paper aims to verify or reject this idea by using quantitative and qualitative research methods.
As a primary tool for this investigation the researcher uses a Learner Corpus constructed with certain design criteria aiming to analyse the learners’ interlanguage.
    The results of the above research, help the teacher to prepare the lesson by providing examples of the use of language and the tactics for the improvement of communication. This action could be exploited in an Italian class by using the data that is produced from the IFLG, as the results of correction, and generally from the research of Learner Corpus

Key words: learner corpus, foreign language acquisition, computer aided error analysis