Comparison Between Original Texts and Their Revisions to Improve Foreign Language Writing

摘要

A text written by non-native speakers makes readers feel unusual, even if there are no evident errors in the sense of basic grammar. We discuss such an intangible error in this paper. Therefore, the goal is to discover the similarities of writing among foreign languages by Japanese native speakers. We compare the original texts written in a foreign language and their revisions by a native speaker to identify the parts which s/he feels unusual and gives the options. To not rely on the subjective context and the uniqueness of a language, we replace a word into a part-of-speech by the morphological analysis. Some parts-of-speech are deleted from the original text by revising a text, and some parts-of-speech are added instead. We consider a set of different parts-of-speech, which is added or deleted by the revision, and find common trends with multiple languages from the numbers and ratios of sentences. These findings are not always familiar to the experts, and on the other hand, they may give new viewpoints to language learners and teachers to improve their activities.