A Corpus Based Study of Commas Use in EFL Written Performance

Abstract

The present paper deals with the Slovak secondary school students' problem of using commas in the complex sentences containing adverbial and nominal subordinate clauses while writing essays in English. It also concentrates on the English teachers' ability to see correct/incorrect usage of commas in their students' works. The research sample is formed by school leaving exam essays written by the students whose English is at an B1 level. The digitalized texts of 115 essays are uploaded in The Main Corpus and divided into 8 different subcorpora referring to different essay's topics. Detailed corpus linguistic and statistical analyses lead to the conclusions that the overall commas use success of the observed EFL students directly depends on how difficult the topic of an essay is, and that the students' error rate in adverbial clauses is much higher than the rate in nominal clauses. The last finding referring to the fact that English language teachers overlook or incorrectly correct commas in a substantial number of sentences makes the authors think about all the possible roots and reasons of the students' inaccuracy in commas usage in their written performance and several suggestions how to solve this problem.

Slovak University Students´ Assessment of Corpus-Driven Grammar Teaching Materials

“…In recent decades, corpus linguistics with its tools and techniques has been appropriate for vocabulary and grammar studies since linguistic corpora provide a direct empirical foundation how a lexical unit behaves instead of relying on traditional linguistic approaches (Meyer, 2002;O´Keeffe et al, 2007;McEnery et al, 2006). Considering this, corpus-based studies have provided better descriptions of different registers and dialects of native English (Lelakova & Toman, 2023;Granger et al, 2002).…”

“…In other words, a linguistic corpus might inform a scholar about the frequency of a structure in a particular context (also in contrast with other grammatical forms), the collocations and colligations of individual structures of a language, the semantic prosody of a linguistic unit in certain contexts, and the differences between spoken and written forms in specific contexts. Moreover, corpora might tell a scholar about specialized applications of grammatical structures usable within English for Specific Purposes (Lacková, 2021;Leláková, 2018;Biber et al, 1998;Flowerdew, 2012). To be more specific, Lindquist (2009) claims that many areas of grammar can be studied in textual corpora by means of relatively simple search procedures.…”

“…Introducing these aspects to Slovakia where English is a foreign language, it is important to realize the role of 466 Slovak University Students´ Assessment of Corpus-Driven … International Journal of Instruction, April 2024 • Vol.17, No.2 corpora in the given sphere. However, a small number of corpus studies have been carried out that demonstrate the direct use of corpora for the needs of English language teaching (Leláková, 2018). Therefore, the study can be seen as a small contribution the lack of studies investigating these aspects.…”