Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Fourth Symposium of Southern Ontario Universities on “Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice: Challenges and Opportunities”, Ontario, Kanada, 02 Haziran 2023
Though few studies investigate the psycholinguistic causes and effects of lexical errors made by L2 users, they have significant potential to provide insight into L2 internal lexicon and illuminate the interlanguage phase of L2 users. Additionally, despite waning interest in the field of applied linguistics, lexical errors still play an important role in second language production and have a lot to offer to language practitioners. Given the fading attention on lexical errors in L2 English and their strategic importance for the field, further research is needed to guide the field of second language acquisition from different angles by exploring understudied language backgrounds. Additionally, more applied linguistics research using corpus linguistics techniques are required to enlighten language teaching experts regarding the major sources of errors, which could help shape teaching and testing materials. Sparked by this growing need, the current research attempts to explore the formal and semantic lexical errors in L1 Turkish – L2 English users’ writing and pinpoint their primary sources following Hemchua and Schmitt’s (2006) error taxonomy. Our learner corpus consists of 350 L2 English student texts. The lexical errors are manually tagged by six different language teaching experts to achieve a moderate inter-rater reliability using the error coding scheme of Sketchengine. The experts have worked cooperatively to (a) detect the lexical error, (b) replace the error with a possible correct version, and (c) discuss the underlying reason for the error. The errors have been coded if at least four of the coders have agreed on the wrong use. The data is analysed descriptively using the Sketchengine interface. The preliminary results suggest L1 Turkish – L2 English users predominantly make semantic lexical, collocational and prepositional errors. The main error sources are near synonym, L1 transfer and typological difference between L1 and L2. These error types resulting from an under-investigated L1 seem to partly resemble the results in earlier research focusing on users with different language backgrounds. This similarity may be indication of an analogous interlanguage phase regardless of L1. The findings are discussed in light of the current theories in second language acquisition and some pedagogical conclusions are drawn.