Evaluation of Error Mark-Up in a Learner Corpus of Czech

Title: Evaluation of Error Mark-Up in a Learner Corpus of Czech Author: Barbora Štindlová Department: Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague Supervisor: prof. PhDr. Karel Šebesta, CSc. Abstract: The thesis deals with the topic of Czech as a second language, while introducing methods of corpus linguistics as applied to texts produced by language learners. The context is the process of building and exploiting a learner corpus, with a focus on its error mark-up and options for evaluating the annotation scheme. Learner corpora have become a major resource for investigating a learner interlanguage and a significant incentive for many different types of research and teaching of second/foreign languages. They are used mainly for contrastive studies of native and non-native speakers, i.e. for contrastive interlanguage analysis, and for computer-aided error analysis of the learner language. This kind of analysis is crucially dependent on the type and quality of the error mark-up. In every error-annotated corpus the error annotation is based on an error typology, which is necessarily problematic from a number of theoretical aspects. Evaluation of the reliability and validity of the annotation scheme design is therefore an important step in the build-up..