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A Learner's Corpora (Interlanguage) Analysis
Punctuation in the text is very good. Full stop is used as a terminating mark for all of the sentences. There are cases where apostrophes have been used (‘patient’s’), cases where colons and semi-colons have been used (‘That leaves 25% of their time that needs to be spent: relakcing; with family and friends’), cases where hypens have been used (‘this has to be changed - there are always ways to improve’), cases where commas have been used (‘People have to sleep properly, party less, stop being lazy’), thus there are also incorrect cases of the use of commas as the rules of the use have been taken from the native language, for example ‘People have to sleep properly, party less, stop being lazy and, most of all, they have to want to change’ – in this sentence the comma that has been put after and should have been placed before and or not at all, thou in Latvian this choice of placement would have been correct.
Vocabulary that is used in the text is rather rich. Several synonyms are used (jogging=running; sports=physical activities). In various places the learner has chosen to use more complex words instead of less complex ones, for example ‘requires’ instead of needs, ‘acknowledges’ instead of realises, etc. There are also used several conjunctions such as ‘thus’, ‘also’, ‘nevertheless’, and ‘however’.
In general, the overall level of English language could be somewhere from intermediate going towards advanced.
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The following interlanguage analysis focuses on both, the success of learning English as a second language and the areas of difficulty that are considered errors in the English language. The learner corpus data that is going to be analysed is written by an adolescent English language learner whose native language is Latvian. The number of words it consists of is 301 (see appendix 1). The framework for analysis is taken from a table introduced by professor Vita Kalnbērziņa and the first year Master students of English Phylology of the University of Latvia during a lecture of the course Language acquisition theory and practice in September, 2010.