Error Analysis in the CAELE Corpus: study on the grammatical agreement in the verb SER in Francophone and Anglo-Saxon learners

Abstract

This article presents a study on Computer Aided Error Analysis. To do this, the identification of errors and the tendency of misuse in Spanish at the A2 level of competence is considered in two subcorpus of the CAELE corpus, a subcorpus of 798 textual sentences of Anglo-Saxon learners of Spanish Language and another subcorpus of 625 textual sentences of French learners. The main objectives are to determine the frequencies of grammatical concordance errors with the verb ser and to compare the similarities and differences observed between Francophone and Anglo-Saxon learners. The results of the research have shown that for Anglo-Saxon learners there are greater difficulties in the selection of the grammatical categories of gender and number in the adjectives, especially in the agreement of the attributes. On the other hand, for French learners, although they present a number of errors in these grammatical aspects, their frequency is notoriously lower.The errors could be attributed to the direct transfer of grammatical rules from L1, affecting the grammatical precision of sentences with the verb ser. These findings contribute to give more solidity to the trends in the specialized literature.