Subject-verb agreement: Error production by Tourism undergraduate students

• Main Authors: Ana Paula Correia, Filipa Perdigão Ribeiro, Maria Cabral
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade do Algarve 2014-11-01
• Series: Dos Algarves: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal
• Subjects: error analysis; interlanguage; writing; verb; foreign language; proficiency levels
• Online Access: http://www.dosalgarves.com/revistas/N24/8rev24.pdf

The aim of this paper, which is part of a more extensive research on verb tense errors, is to investigate the subject-verb agreement errors in the simple present in the texts of a group of Tourism undergraduate students. Based on the concept of interlanguage and following the error analysis model, this descriptive non-experimental study applies qualitative and quantitative procedures. Three types of instruments were used to collect data: a sociolinguistic questionnaire (to define the learners’ profile); the Dialang test (to establish their proficiency level in English); and our own learner corpus (140 texts). Errors were identified and classified by an expert panel in accordance with a verb error taxonomy developed for this study based on the taxonomy established by the Cambridge Learner Corpus. The Markin software was used to code errors in the corpus and the Wordsmith Tools software to analyze the data. Subject-verb agreement errors and their relation with the learners’ proficiency levels are described.