From Learners' Corpora to Expert Knowledge Description : Analyzing Prepositions in the NICT JLE (Japanese Learner English) Corpus

textThe present study has two main purposes. One is to show what the NICT JLE corpus analysis tool and commercial tools can do for analysing error annotated learner corpora. The other is to show how possible L1 transfer effects can be analyzed using learner corpora. We take preposition errors as examples, which often occur as collocation. For future direction, we suggest that standardization of a shared collocation dictionary rather than a word list is needed, especially for Japanese English learners for pedagogic purposes. We also propose that an objective method to characterize L1 transfer needs to be developed. We assume that back-translation of each utterance would be one of the effective ways to extract L1 translation, in other words, Bi-lingual aligned corpus and machine translation software would be a foundation to develop such a method.conference pape