Error Analysis: Activity 1
What errors did you notice?
Please read the information about error analysis before working through these activities.
This activity assumes that you have completed the "Learners" section. If you have not, you can watch the interview videos in Learners: Activity 1.
Without going back to look at the interviews again, what do you recall about Jiulin and AnnaLi’s language?
- Did either of them seem to be more proficient in Chinese than the other? Which one? What made you think that?
- Jot down some notes about the errors in their learner language that you remember, the ones that seemed to “jump out” at you? Were there instances of “foreign accent”? Grammar error?
Please type your answers to the questions in the box below.
When you have finished typing your answer, click to compare your response with the Learner Language staff response.
- Jiulin and AnnaLi seem to be at the same general proficiency level. They both produce errors and ask for the interviewer to clarify or repeat their questions. But we can also see ways their proficiency profiles differ. Jiulin seems to have more difficulty in understanding the interviewer’s questions, asking more often for clarification or repetition. He also produces more sentence fragments or leaves sentences incomplete. Several times he seems to have trouble framing his responses and fails to get his meanings across. But at the same time, his responses to the questions are longer and more varied on average than AnnaLi’s. AnnaLi appears to be more fluent and at ease when framing her responses, which tend to be shorter and less varied.
- Both learners make a lot of noticeable errors in negation. Though Jiulin produces long sentences, he also uses a lot of incorrect vocabulary, such as “墨西哥移民人(Mexican immigrant people)”, “西班牙说人 (Spanish speak people)”, as well as obvious errors on syntactic structures such as comparison and negation. In addition to her errors with negation, AnnaLi tends to incorrectly use the complement structure “得(DE)”. You may have noticed that both learners have reasonably intelligible pronunciation.
