Analysis of Compositions by B1 Level (Threshold) Francophone Learners of Catalan: Typology of Errors and Correspondences

Abstract

The focus of this research is to study the different types of errors made by intermediate level learners of Catalan (Threshold, B1) in written productions. The corpus is made up of compositions written by learners with French as a first language (L1) that were part of the official Catalan language examinations of the Ramon Llull Institute, conducted in Montreal between 2009 and 2016. We systematically identified and analyzed errors in each written text using an ad hoc constructed classification system presented here. Errors were categorized in terms of linguistic description criteria (linguistic aspect and modification type) and etiological criteria (interlinguistic influences and intralinguistic causes).

With a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), it was possible to identify associations and association patterns between the characteristics of different variables. For example, we were able to observe the more or less significant impact of certain variables on the occurrence of an error, the most frequent characteristics of certain types of errors, etc. The analysis is supplemented with real examples from our corpus.

The results we obtained allowed us not only to observe certain types of general phenomena, but also to detect specific recurrent errors from our corpus. This information would be useful to teachers when creating pedagogical activities in their quest to seek more effective ways to support their learners in writing (Arntzen, Håkansson, Hjedle & Keßler, 2019).