Instructive proposals for the most effective teaching of the article in Greek (definite – indefinite – no article) based on the results of the use of a learner corpus

Instructive proposals for the most effective teaching of the article in Greek (definite – indefinite – no article) based on the results of the use of a learner corpus

Chatzitheodorou, Antigoni

The analysis proposed, although based on the Theory of Error Analysis (Corder 1960’s), tends to establish a different way of approaching language errors (Theodoropoulou & Papanastasiou: 2001, Theophanopoulou – Kontou: 2001, Christidis: 1987, Brown: 1981) in second language acquisition, by maintaining the positive sides that the theory introduced to literature (Norrish: 1983 & Krashen: 1981). I shall argue about how useful making mistakes can be for the formation of the interlanguage of students and I focus on the acquisition of the article (definite – indefinite – no article) in Greek. The aim of my study is to explore whether the relevant errors on the subject during the acquisition of a language like Greek, which has article, depend on the mother tongue of the student. This is the reason why, in 2008, I conducted a learner corpus with data provided by the Modern Greek Language Teaching Center of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where students of different nationalities (England, Russia, Turkey etc.) study Greek. The learner Corpus consists of 100 compositions with a word limit of 250 words. From these, 38 have stated that they have completed the A2 level, 28 the B2, 19 the C1 and 15 didn’t write the level they had completed. The data was analysed by the use of the Computer Programme “Simiotis.exe”. My conclusion was that similar errors can be observed in the output of students, which are native speakers of languages with and languages without article. After having completed a contrastive analysis of the article in English and in Greek in order to show that language transfer is not enough to explain the errors considering the article and by analysing the data, I shall propose an effective way of teaching the phenomenon, so that some errors can either be expected by the tutor or even prevented.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012

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