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Errors in the usage of article in advanced EFL learners with Spanish as L1
Hubáčková, Iva ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to find out in which contexts advanced EFL learners with Spanish as L1 tend to use articles incorrectly, and to what extent these errors can be ascribed to L1 transfer. For this purpose, a selection of 30 speakers from the Spanish part of the spoken learner corpus LINDSEI was examined. The errors were tagged using a modified version of the Louvain error- tagging manual. They were then classified according to the article forms and the types of reference. Lastly, the excerpts were compared with their Spanish counterparts. The research revealed that the most-error prone area is non-referring uses of the indefinite article. However, the majority of these errors were caused by factors, other than L1-transfer. In fact, the fact that there were few errors in expressing definiteness suggests that the positive role of transfer prevails. Also, the number of "transfer errors" in individual speakers' performances was not always proportional to the total number of errors. And last but not least, in many cases, the role of transfer is questionable as in Spanish, there are cases where more than one form is considered correct. The findings of this thesis should thus serve as starting point for further research, which would provide answer to questions this study could not answer. Key...
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