Investigating common errors in the use of positions of adverbials of time by non english major students at the university of science m a 60 14 10

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY
UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
…………………..…………………..

INVESTIGATING COMMON ERRORS OF
POSITIONS OF ADVERBIALS
BY NON-ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
(TESOL)

Submitted by LƯƠNG UYÊN PHƯƠNG

Supervisor
Assoc. Prof - Dr. ĐINH ĐIỀN

Ho Chi Minh City, December 2009

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CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINAL

I certificate my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:
INVESTIGATING COMMON ERRORS OF
POSITIONS OF ADVERBIALS BY NON-ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE

in terms of the statement of Requirements for Thesis in Master’s Programs issued
by the Higher Degree Committee. This thesis has not been submitted for the award
of any degree or diploma in any other institution.

Ho Chi Minh City, December 30, 2009

Lương Uyên Phương

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RETENTION AND USE OF THESES
I hereby state that I, LƯƠNG UYÊN PHƯƠNG, being a candidate for the
degree of Master of Arts (TESOL) accepted the requirements of the University
relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library.

In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited
in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in
accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan
or reproduction of theses.

Ho Chi Minh City, December 30, 2009

Lương Uyên Phương

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I wish to express my profound gratefulness to my supervisor,

Associate Professor - Dr. Dinh Dien, Lecturer of the Department of Comparative
Linguistics – HCMC University of Social Sciences and Humanities; Lecturer of the
Department of Computing Science – HCMC University of Science for his
invaluable guidance, assistance and encouragement during the preparation and
completion of this thesis.
I am extremely grateful to the Head of English Department of the University
of Science - Dr. Nguyen Hoang Tuan for his patience in reading the thesis again and
again and clarifying my ideas.
I would like to express my deep gratefulness to Dr. Nguyen Thai An who
willingly gave me valuable evaluations and comments on my project.
Also, I must thank the students at the University of Science who wrote the
compositions and particularly those who sat for the Diagnostic Test under such
difficult circumstances.
On a personal level, I am grateful to my husband and my parents who were
there to share the ups and downs with me. More especially, my little son has given
me strength and motivation to complete this thesis.
Last but not least, never would this thesis have been accomplished without
all those who helped me their handful hands in the research project: Mr. Lưu Vĩnh
Tấn, Ms. Nguyễn Thị Xuyên and their precious remarks.

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ABSTRACT
This study is a corpus-based study of common errors in adverbial placement
of EFL students at the University of Science. The conceptual motivation for this
project is based on the ideas behind Error Analysis and Contrastive Analysis and on
the role of learner corpora in relation to these two paradigms.
The hypotheses to be tested in this study are:
1. There is no difference between the errors made by the students due to

mother tongue interference and those due to difficulties of the target language.
2. There is no statistically significant correlation at the 0.05 level between
students’ scores on the diagnostic test and their scores in English writing essay in
the study.
A database of errors extracted from 100 written essays was typed and tagged
for error tagging. The tagged errors which extracted from the Corpus of learner
language then compared in turn with occurrences in The Collins Cobuild Corpus -

a corpus composed of 56 million words of contemporary written and spoken text
of native speaker. A diagnostic test was constructed from the students’ authentic
written compositions added to the validity and reliability. Then, the Correlation
Matrix was computed to assess whether the means of two groups are statistically
different from each other.
The first hypothesis of the study was rejected. The results showed that there
was a signification difference between errors due to the students’ mother tongue
interference and those due to difficulties of the target language.
The second hypothesis was also rejected at 0.05. The results showed that
there was significant correlation between the students’ achievement in English
writing and their achievement in the diagnostic test of English adverbial positions.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINAL ............................................................................... i
RETENTION AND USE OF THESES ...................................................................iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................... iv
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................ v
TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................... vi
LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................. x

LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................. xi
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................... xiii

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................... 1
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY ..................................................................1
1.2 AIMS OF THE STUDY ................................................................................... 2
1.3 RESEARCH QUESTION ..................................................................................2
1.4 TERMINOLOGY ..............................................................................................3
1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY ...................................................................5
1.6 OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY .........................................................................6

Chapter 2 LITERATURE REVIEW .........................................................7
2.1 ERRORS ANALYSIS .......................................................................................7
2.1.1 LEARNER ERRORS ................................................................................7
2.1.1.1 Errors versus mistakes .....................................................................7
2.1.1.2 Sources and Causes of Errors .........................................................8
2.1.1.2.1 Interlingual transfer ..............................................................8
2.1.1.2.2 Intralingual transfer ..............................................................9
2.1.1.2.3 Context of learning .............................................................. 10
2.1.2 APPROACHES OF ERROR ANALYSIS ............................................... 11
2.1.2.2 Traditional Error Analysis ............................................................ 11
2.1.2.2 Corpus-based approaches for error analysis ..................................12
2.1.2.2.1 Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) ........................... 13

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2.1.2.2.2 Computer-Aided Error Analysis (CEA) ............................... 13
2.1.2.2.3 Bringing CIA and CEA together ........................................ 14
2.1.2.2.4 Error Tagging system for learner corpora ............................ 14

2.1.2.2.4a Principles of error tagging............................................. 15
2.1.2.2.4b Illustrated examples for error tagging ........................... 15
2.1.2.3 Steps in the process of corpus-based error analysis ....................... 17
2.1.2.4 Error correction ............................................................................. 20
2.2 THE POSITIONS OF ADVERBIALS IN AN ENGLISH SENTENCE ........... 21
2.2.1 Basic points of the positions of adverbial in an English sentence ............. 21
2.2.1.1 Initial position .............................................................................. 22
2.2.1.2 Medial position ............................................................................. 23
2.2.1.3 Final position ................................................................................ 24
2.2.2 Exceptions related to the position of adverbials........................................ 25
2.2.2.1 Adverbials and arguments ............................................................. 25
2.2.2.2 Adverbials and subject in negative sentences and questions ......... 27
2.2.2.3 Adverbials in gap constructions ..................................................... 28
2.2.2.4 The position of adverbials in multiple adverbial clauses ................ 29
2.2.2.5 Order of importance vs. order of time ............................................ 30
2.3 POSITIONS OF ADVERBIALS IN A VIETNAMESE SENTENCE .............. 31
2.3.1 Basic points of the positions of adverbial in an English sentence ............. 31
2.3.2 Order of importance vs. order of time ...................................................... 32
2.4 PREVIOUS STUDIES .................................................................................... 34
2.5 SUMMARY ....................................................................................................37

Chapter 3 METHODOLOGY....................................................................38
3.1 Research design ............................................................................................... 38
3.2 Subjects ........................................................................................................... 38
3.3 Description of corpora ..................................................................................... 41
3.3.1 The Learner Corpus ................................................................................. 41

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3.3.2 The Collins Cobuild Corpus ...................................................................42
3.4 Instruments and Data Collection Procedures .................................................... 43
3.4.1 Collecting errors ...................................................................................... 44
3.4.2 Identifying errors..................................................................................... 44
3.4.3 Describing errors ..................................................................................... 46
3.4.4 Designing a diagnostic test .....................................................................47
3.4.5 Comparing and Explaining errors ............................................................ 51
3.4.6 Testing two hypotheses of the study ....................................................... 54
3.5 SUMMARY ....................................................................................................55

Chapter 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS ..........................................56
4.1 RESULTS FOR HYPOTHESIS 1 ...................................................................56
4.1.1 Errors due to MTI.................................................................................... 59
4.1.2 Errors due to DTL ................................................................................... 60
4.2 ERROR ANALYSIS ....................................................................................... 61
4.2.1 MTI errors ............................................................................................... 61
4.2.2 DTL errors .............................................................................................. 65
4.3 RESULTS FOR HYPOTHESIS 2: ..................................................................70
4.3.1 The frequency distribution of the students’ scores from the diagnostic
test ......................................................................................................... 71
4.3.2 The frequency distribution of the students’ writing scores from the their
essays ......................................................................................................72
4.3.3 Correlation between the students’ English mastery of adverbial positions
and their English writing proficiency....................................................... 73
4.3 SUMMARY ....................................................................................................75

Chapter 5 IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ............76
5.1 Implications and Recommendations.................................................................76
5.2 Suggested classroom techniques in teaching adverbials ...................................77
5.2.1 Teaching English adverbials through corpora .......................................... 78

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5.2.2 Teaching English adverbials through action ............................................ 80
5.2.3 Teaching English adverbials in audio-visual environment ....................... 82
5.3 LIMITATION .................................................................................................85
5.4 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................... 85
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 87

APPENDICES
APPENDIX 1

A sample essay

99

APPENDIX 2

Common errors of adverbial positions in randomly chosen
essays

100

APPENDIX 3A Diagnostic Test

107

APPENDIX 3B Answer Sheet

111

APPENDIX 4

Errors in the diagnostic test

112

APPENDIX 5

Raw data of the sample

118

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LIST OF FIGURES
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1: Illustration of functions of a corpus-based program
Figure 2.2: Screenshot of concordance lines with errors of prepositions
Figure 2.3: Steps in the process of corpus-based error analysis
Figure 2.4: Description of word categories and their frequencies of errors
Figure 2.5: Description of word categories and their frequencies of errors types

Figure 2.6: Screenshot of types and explanations for tagged errors
Figure 2.7: Contrastive Interlanguage Analaysis
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1: Subjects’ age
Figure 3.2: Subjects’ gender
Figure 3.3: The place where the students attended high school
Figure 3.4: The time when the students started to learn English
Figure 3.5: Screenshot of concordance lines extracted from CUS
Figure 3.6: Screenshot of concordance lines of error tagging
Figure 3.7: Screenshot of error-correction process of CASEC-G software
Figure 3.8: Random Test Generator – PRO 8.3 screen shot
Figure 3.9: Test-Builder screenshot of Random Test Generator-PRO 8.3
Figure 3.10: Screenshot of searching the word “highly” followed with adverbs
Figure 3.11: Screenshot of concordance lines of “highly” followed with adverbs
Figure 3.12: Screenshot of a sample Correlation Matrix of SPC XL software
Figure 3.13: Screenshot of a sample scatter chart of SPC XL software
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1: Distribution of errors in types of adverbial
Figure 4.2: Distribution of errors of English adverbial positions due to MTI
Figure 4.3: Distribution of errors of English adverbial positions due to DTL
Figure 4.4: Histogram of the frequency distribution of scores on the diagnostic test

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Figure 4.5: Histogram of frequency distribution of scores on the students’ writings

Figure 4.6: The scatter diagram of the diagnostic test scores and the writing scores
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1: Screenshot of a corpus-based task for teaching adverb “never”
Figure 5.2: Screenshot of concordance lines of “never”
Figure 5.3: Screenshot of a clip of adverb song
Figure 5.3: Screenshot of the song “My love affair with adverb”
Figure 5.4: Screenshot of the clip “How to parent like the President”
Figure 5.5: Screenshot of a video clip of adverbial phrases
Figure 5.6: Screenshot of a video clip of adverbial positions

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LIST OF TABLES

Chapter 2
Table 2.1: The position of adverbials in multiple adverbial clause
Table 2.2: Illustrations extracted from The Da Vinci Code
Chapter 3
Table 3.1: Distribution of errors found in the students’ essays and later used as test items
Table 3.2: POS tags used to search in Collins Cobuild Corpus

Chapter 4
Table 4.1: Test items removed from the list of the students’ common errors
Table 4.2: Summary statistics of the diagnostic test
Table 4.3: Summary statistics of the writing scores

Table 4.4: The pairwise correlation coefficient
Chapter 5

Table 5.1: The differences of task-based and corpus-based approach

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
US

University of Science

CUS

Corpus of learner language at the University of Science

CCC

Collins Cobuild Corpus

CLC

Cambridge Learners’ Corpus

JEFLL

Japanese EFL Learner Corpus

LLC

Longman Learner Corpus

ICLE

International Corpus of Learner English

CALL

Computer-Aided Language Learning

L1

First Language / Native language

L2

Second Language / Foreign Language

SLA

Second Language Acquisition

NS

Native Speakers

NNS

Non-native Speakers - examples taken from student essays

CA

Error Analysis

CA

Contrastive Analysis

CEA

Computer-aided error analysis

CIA

Contrastive interlanguage analysis

EFL

English as a Foreign Language

ESOL

English for Speakers of Other Languages

IL

Interlanguage

MTI

Mother tongue interference

DTL

Difficulties of the Target Language

POS

Part of Speech

*

Unacceptable form



Suggested correction

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Introduction

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Learning a foreign language generally implies making errors in various
areas, especially in grammar. A very common type of error which learners make
when producing grammatical structures involves the use of adverbs, specially
misplacing them in the sentence. A tricky problem for Vietnamese learners of
English is to know where to put adverbials in relation to the verb, as can be seen in
these examples taken from undergraduate essays of Corpus of learner language at
the University of Science (CUS):
*…some of them even do not know how much money they have to pay.
* I even never opened the letter.
*I hope I can speak fluently English.
The problem with lumping all of these very diverse words into one category
is that it can make learning the rules about how to use them seem complicated.
From the actuality of teaching and learning as well as the approach to current issues
in the domain of adverbial which are widely discussed nowadays, the author of the
present study can realize that there are some subjective ones in the process of
teaching and learning this grammatical category. As Chomsky said, “adverbials are
a rich and as yet relatively unexplored system.” [Chomsky, 1965: 219] This is true
not only for non-majored-English students but also for English majors.
In fact, the question of adverbial placement in learner language has received
considerable attention from researchers in Second Language Acquisition, but there
is a relative lack of corpus-based studies. To complement elicited data, it is useful to
have information about spontaneous production of adverbials in learner language.
Given the infrequent nature of unsolicited adverb use, access to corpus data is the
only feasible way of collecting enough occurrences to reveal possible patterns in the
spontaneous placement of adverbs.

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Introduction

1.2 AIMS OF THE STUDY
Descriptively, the study was designed to diagnose and investigate common
errors and their possible causes in the use of English adverbials as well as to
determine whether or not there exists a relationship between learners’ achievement
in English writing on the one hand and their achievement in a diagnostic test
focused on English adverbials on the other. Those errors were then compared in
turn with occurrences in the Collins Cobuild Corpus (CCC). Through that finding,
it shows a comparison of adverb placement in the written productions of EFL
learners of the University of Science and in those of native speakers.
Theoretically, the study aims to find out two hypotheses: (1) there is no
difference between the errors made by the students due to mother tongue
interference (abbreviated to MTI) and those due to difficulties of the target language
(abbreviated to DTL); (2) there is no statistically significance correlation between
the score given to the students’ diagnostic tests and the score given to their essays
written in English.
Practically, this study is based on corpus linguistic, especially of the
application “error tagging” for error analysis in the hope that they can act as
something new for language research in general. For specific purposes, in order to
help students to overcome difficulties and master the use of English adverbials, the
author of the thesis collected examples of errors of adverbial position from the

corpus of learner to determine the frequency of occurrence, and, more importantly,
if these errors are persistent problems that warrants targeting in the classroom, it is
useful in design practical and applicable solutions for teaching.
1.3 RESEARCH QUESTION
In order to reach the aim of the study, the process of researching is guided by
the major question:
What are common errors of adverbial placement made by the students at the
University of Science?

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Introduction

In order to clarify the matters related to this question and to support the
general purposes, the study also deals with some more sub-questions:
- What are the causes which were behind the errors that the students made?
- Can the students’ use of English adverbial as observed from the diagnostic
test be seen through their ability to write essays in English?
- What pedagogical implications for teachers can be drawn from the findings
of this study to help students deal with such errors?
1.4 TERMINOLOGY
1.4.1 Adverbial
Richards and Platt [1992: 9] note that the word adverb refers to single words
that modify verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Adverbs answer the questions how,
when, where, and why, and most of them modify or describe actions, states, or

qualities. Any phrase or clause that is used as an adverb is called adverbial.
1.4.2 Learner corpora
Learner corpora, also called inter-language (IL) or L2 corpora, are electronic
collections of authentic foreign or second language data. There is an increasing
interest in learner corpora both as a pedagogical tool, as well as a research tool.
Learner corpora have been used mostly to provide information on learners’ common
errors, especially useful when annotated with the help of a standardized system of
error tags. “They are also characterized by a high rate of misuse, i.e. orthographic,
lexical, and grammatical errors, as in the Longman Dictionary of Common Errors
(based on the Longman Learner Corpus) for a state of the art account of the use of
learner corpus for teaching purposes.” [Nesselhauf, 2004: 18]
1.4.3 Concordance
A concordance is a list of occurrences of a particular word, part of a word or
combination of words, in its contexts drawn from a text corpus. The search word is
sometimes also referred to as key word. The most common way of displaying a

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Introduction

concordance is by a series of lines with the keyword in context. [Bernhard
Kettemann, 2006]
1.4.4 Concordancing is a method of analyzing language by studying structures

found in effective communication. [Garry N. Dyck, 1999] It is also a descriptive

method, but instead of focusing on the data of a single expression as in the
introspective approach, the expression is shown in a large number of contexts
and examined quantitatively. In this way, meaning and grammar can be
discovered by an examination of patterns in the examples. In contrast to the
introspective method which focuses on the teacher’s intuition, there is a greater
focus on the data in this method.
1.4.5 Concordancer
A concordancer is a software program that is used to analyze corpora and list
the results. [Daniel Krieger, 2003] “The concordancer can find a selected word and
list sentences or portions of sentences containing that word, called key word in
context. It can also identify collocations or words most often found together with
the key word…” [Garry N. Dyckn, 1999] providing students with information on
patterns in sample sentences of real language.
1.4.6 Token words
Token words are the word forms that are counted according to their
occurrence in the corpus. In this example: “I am reading a book”, there are 5 tokens.
1.4.7 Error tagging
Error tagging system is the construction of an error annotation system
includes the design of a taxonomy of errors alongside its pertinent tags, which are to
be inserted in the learner corpus manually. [Izumi et al., 2004: 35]

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Introduction

1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
In Vietnam, there is almost been no scholar work developing deeply the
issues related to English adverbials. In such a situation, theoretically, the study will
make a contribution to the theoretical studies of Vietnamese linguistic on the one
hand and to provide implications for the teaching and learning on the other hand. By
creating our own corpus and identifying and classifying errors in our database, we
are able to design pedagogical materials which are more “locally” oriented for
learners in a particular context.
Practically, this corpus-based study not only gives “learners who receive
only corrective feedback” but also compares with occurrences in the Collins
Cobuild Corpus which is composed of 56 million words of contemporary written
and spoken text of native speaker in the hope to “go a long way to improve their
target language writing style”. It helps students to get a general and systematic view
on English adverbials in order to understand firmly and use them more confidently,
not merely for the sake of passing examinations, but also to achieve higher
communicative competence with the English language.
Furthermore, this corpus-based approach provides new insights into the way
the language operates opening new perspectives of grammar of the target language.
This characteristic is also very useful for teachers in teaching foreign languages and
for linguists in doing contrastive studies.
Last but not least, the study also offers a new model named “error tagging”
to search for particular errors and find plenty of examples of error description and
specificity to use on English written material by Vietnamese learners so that the
linguistics can apply it to build other corpora in other languages to serve a variety of
fields. Moreover, this corpus analysis opens the gates of a new era for language
research.

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Introduction

1.6 OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY
The structure of the dissertation is organized in chapters, sections and
subsections. In detail, Chapter 1 discusses the practical background, the aim and
research question as well as terminologies related to the thesis.
Chapter 2 presents an overview of the literature and the research relevant to
this study. It consists of three main parts: (i) error analysis including limitations of
traditional error analysis and the application of corpus-based error analysis,
especially of error-tagging; (ii) the positions of adverbials in an English sentence
and (iii) positions of adverbials in a Vietnamese sentence.
Chapter 3 is the research design with a description of the student subjects as
well as the two corpora, instruments and the collection procedures. These parts are
the core of the present study. They are concerned with the steps of a corpus – based
error analysis. In detail, corpus-based methodology is used to investigate data,
concordances and tagging tools are used to provide semantic profiles of specific
words highlighting differences, and error analysis is used to identify these common
errors.
Chapter 4 discusses and analyzes the findings, seeking for satisfactory
answers for the four research questions and two null hypotheses.
Chapter 5 draws conclusion about the implications of the findings and
suggests some techniques and methods of teaching English adverbials to enhance
students’ ability to use them precisely, especially of adverbial placement.
Furthermore, the limitations of this thesis and the further recommended are also
stated out in the last chapter.

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Literature review

Chapter 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter reviews the literature relevant to the study of the M.A. thesis.
The four main and distinguishing parts are needed to be involved:
(1) Error analysis (abbreviated to EA) consisting of the definitions of errors and
mistakes, limitations of traditional error analysis as well as corpus-based approaches
to error analysis with the process of error tagging, successive steps in EA research
and possible sources of errors;
(2) Basic points and exceptions of the adverbial positions in an English sentence;
(3) Basic points of the adverbial positions in an English sentence;
(4) Previous studies of adverbial positions.
2.1 ERRORS ANALYSIS
2.1.1 Learner Errors
2.1.1.1 Errors versus mistakes
Corder introduced the distinction between errors (in competence) and
mistakes (in performance). An error is produced when the learner lacks linguistic
knowledge or competence about a rule or the system of the second language. This
can be seen in texts where a specific type of error occurs several times. A
“mistake”, on the other hand, is non-systematic and appears more randomly. It does
not necessarily indicate the knowledge of a learner, but rather problems in
production. Mistakes are most common in speech but can also be found in writing.

This study is based on errors, but since it is difficult to rule out mistakes,
some mistakes will be sorted under errors. The examples from the material will be
cited as they were written, without corrections, except a few cases when slight
corrections are needed to make sense of the sentence. Each type of error will
contain a description of the error, followed by examples and a brief summary of the
instances of that error found in the material.

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2.1.1.2 Sources of Errors
Learners make errors in both comprehension and production. Corder [1974:
25] has pointed out: "It is very difficult to assign the cause of failures in
comprehension to an inadequate knowledge of a particular syntactic feature of a
misunderstood utterance".
However, based on the magnitude of errors which includes errors at different
levels such as a phoneme, morpheme, word, sentence or paragraph, Richards [1984:
123] divides errors into two kinds: global errors and local errors. According to him,
“global errors” are those which involve the “overall structure of the sentence”.
Therefore, it can hinder the communication and prevent the message from being
understood. On the contrary, local errors are those which affect “a particular
constituent” of the sentence and they don’t prevent the message from being
comprehended because the hearer can still guess the intended meaning easily.
Basing on the source of errors, Richards [1974: 206], Jack C Richard, John

Platt, Heidi Platt [1992: 127-128] supposed that there are two types of errors:
interlingual and intralingual errors. The former is caused by the interference of the
mother tongue while the latter is the result of interference within the target
language.
2.1.1.2.1 Interlingual transfer
Wilkins observes:
"When learning a foreign language an individual already knows his mother
tongue, and it is this which he attempts to transfer. The transfer may prove to be
justified because the structure of the two languages is similar - in that case we get
“positive transfer” or “facilitation” - or it may prove unjustified because the
structure of the two languages are different - in that case we get “negative
transfer” - or “interference”.

[Wilkins, 1972: 199]
Interlingual errors are those which result from language transfer, that is, which are
caused by the learners’ native language. For example, Vietnamese students may say
that “Yesterday, I visit Hanoi capital”. In this sentence, they forget to put the verb
“visit” in the past tense. It is easy to understand because in Vietnamese, when

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Literature review

talking about the past tense, they do not have to conjugate. Instead, they just use
some adverbs of time such as “Yesterday, last year, last month, two years ago, etc”,

which is enough to describe the past tense. In contrast, intralingual errors are those
which result from faulty or partial learning of the target language, rather than from
language transfer. In other words, it reflects the learners’ competence at a particular
stage.
Richards [1971] focuses on several types of errors which do not derive from
transfer from the mother tongue. These kinds of errors are called intralingual and
developmental errors.
2.1.1.2.2 Intralingual transfer
As Richard [1971: 58] states,
“intralingual inference refers to items produced by the learner which
reflect not the structure of the mother tongue, but generalizations
based on partial exposure to the target language.”
Intralingual errors are errors include false analogy (e.g. boy and boys vs. child and
*childs), misanalysis, incomplete rule application (under generalization), exploiting
redundancy,

overlooking

co-occurrence

restrictions,

hypercorrection

and

overgeneralization [185-187]. These errors include the use of holistic strategies (e.g.
Students do not find the required form, so they try to use another near-equivalent
second language item which they have learnt). For them there are four main types of
errors including omissions, additions, misformation and misordering.

To be more specific, they point out the definition of each type of error as
followed: (1) Omissions: the absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed
utterance (e.g. in early stages of learning, the omission of function words rather than
content words) [p.107]. (2) Additions: the presence of an item that must not appear
in well-formed utterances (e.g. failure to delete certain items: He doesn’t know*s
me) [p.107] (3) Misformations: the use of wrong form of the morpheme or structure
(sometimes called misselections [p.108-109] (4) Misorderings: the incorrect
placement of a morpheme or group of morphemes in an utterance (e.g. The

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misplacement of adverbials, interrogatives and adjectives) (p.110) [Cited in Ellis,
1995, p.56].
In general, an intralingual error may be caused by the influence of on target
language item upon another while developmental errors occur when the learner
attempts to build up hypothesis about the target language on the basis of limited
experience”. In this thesis, intralingual errors are also named errors due to
“difficulties of the target language” (abbreviated to DTL)
2.1.1.2.3 Context of learning
One more kind of sources of errors is context of learning which refers to “the
social situation.”[Brown, 1980: 174] The students make these errors due to a
“misleading explanation from the teacher, faulty presentation of a structure or word
in the textbook” or due to “a pattern that was rotely memorized in a drill but not

probably contextualized”. However, this kind of source has not been explored and
identified easily in this thesis, except for an interview that somehow makes it
clearer.
In short, there are many different ways to classify the errors students of
second language make. In this paper, the researcher chooses the way of classifying
the types of errors by the authors Richards [1974] and Wilkins as mentioned above
as criteria for analysis of common errors in the placement of adverbials. Although
“it is very difficult to distinguish transfer and intralingual errors, it is not easy to
recognize various kinds of intralingual error the author of the thesis had an attempt
to identify all possible sources of the error identified in this M.A thesis, those which
have finally been divided into two main kinds: MTI errors, i.e. interlingual errors
and DTL errors, i.e. intralingual errors.

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2.1.2 APPROACHES OF ERROR ANALYSIS
2.1.2.1 Traditional Error Analysis (TEA)
Although it is widely recognized that error analysis (abbreviated as EA)
contributes to describing learner language and the improving second language
pedagogy, several problems and limitations have been pointed out mainly because a
concrete methodology of EA has not been established yet.
Most importantly, EA cannot be successful without robust error typology,
which is often very difficult to obtain. Since it used to be difficult to collect or

access large databases of learner language, a robust error typology that covers
almost all error types was not established in traditional EA Another criticism
against EA is that errors reflect only one side of learner language. A lot of people
point out that if a researcher analyzes only errors and neglects what learners can do
correctly, he/she will fail to capture the entire picture of learner language. It is timeconsuming to count both correct and incorrect usages in learner data, and this must
have been quite difficult to do in the past before computing technology was
developed.
Furthermore, the real significance of EA cannot be identified without using
diachronic data in order to describe learners’ developmental stages. The types and
frequencies of errors change with each acquisition phase. Without longitudinal data
of learner language, it is difficult to obtain a reliable result by EA.
In short, the problems and limitations of traditional EA are mainly due to the
deficiency of computing technology and the lack of large databases in early times.
However, now that computing technology has advanced, and a lot of learner data is
available, it might be possible to perform EA more effectively mainly by annotating
errors. And “if you are a student of English, a teacher, a translator or if you are
writing in English, analysing English, or have any questions about how English
works, a corpus-based approach can be of great benefit to you.” [James Thomas,
2008:33]

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2.1.2.2 Corpus-based approaches for error analysis

The plural form of corpus is usually “corpora”. Theoretically, corpora should
be (C)apable (O)f (R)epresenting (P)otentially (U)nlimited (S)elections of texts. In
fact, the term CORPUS can be derived from its features it implies:
C : Compatible to computers
O : Operational in research and application
R : Representative of the source language
P : Processable by both man and machine
U : Unlimited in amount of data, and
S : Synchronic in formation and representation [James Thomas, 2008: 35]
Language corpora usually represent a large collection of representative
samples obtained from texts covering different varieties of language used in various
domains of linguistic activities. A corpus helps us to understand more about the
language and see how people use it when they speak and when they write.
According to the website of Cambridge University Press at the link
it can give us answers
to questions such as these below.

Figure 2.1: Illustration of functions of a corpus-based program
The use of computer tools has allowed researchers to handle vast corpora, to
gain better insight into authentic learner language at different levels – lexis,

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