NEWS AND EVENTS ARCHIVE (2009-2014)
Archive
Research Seminar: Investigating Students' Grammatical Errors in Producing and Recognising German Language.
Date: 3 March 2009 Time: 5.00 pm
Birgit Smith (Lancaster University) will give a talk entitled 'Investigating Students' Grammatical Errors in Producing and Recognising German Language'.
Bowland North Seminar Room 14.
Anarchy in German grammar?
An investigation of students' grammatical errors in producing and recognising German structures.
Explicit grammar teaching has been a controversial issue not only in second language acquisition research, but also in language policies that have affected the school curriculum, subsequent examinations and language teaching materials. Corpora have played a role in language teaching in recent years, mainly in the form of a data-driven approach or analysis of learner corpora. I will explore the application of a corpus to teach explicit metalinguistic knowledge to improve students' accuracy in German language tasks. The corpus comprising mainly articles of German newspapers and magazines was compiled with the purpose of teaching explicit German grammar. Second year undergraduate students studying German as part of their degree at Lancaster University participated in a series of studies. It was found that these students achieved better results in written tests than students who did not participate. The analyses of students' errors showed that errors such as gender and case were far more frequent than errors such as plurals and conjunctions. In addition, six case studies support the quantitative findings. These findings are discussed and some implications for foreign language teaching are suggested.
Birgit Smith
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Who can attend: Anyone
Further information
Associated staff:
Organising departments and research centres: European Languages and Cultures
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