Parsing Learner Text: to Shoehorn or not to Shoehorn

摘要

The texts written by language learners can be considered a type of non-canonical text. Language learners tend to make errors when writing in a second language and in this regard, can be seen to violate the canonical rules of a language. The kinds of errors that learners may make include: spelling, grammatical, vocabulary, collocation. The extent and degree to which learners make errors will depend on their proficiency level and this is a factor that should be taken into account when thinking about non-native writing. Highly proficient speakers will make very few errors, and given just a small sample of text it may not even be possible to identify that they are language learners. However, at the same time, the kinds of errors that even highly-proficient language learners make are often very different from the kinds of errors that a native speaker will make. A non-native speaker is likely to have the most trouble with collocations and lexical choice, whereas a native speaker will be less likely to have difficulty here (Leacock et al., 2014).