Errors in Second Language Acquisition: A study based on the German and Spanish components of COREFL

This dissertation analyses a set of errors concerning the omission of the third person -s made by Spanish and German L2 learners of English in the COREFL learner corpus. With a corpus-based approach, the errors were analysed from a grammatical point of view. The errors were also sorted according to some variables, including the learners’ proficiency level and the texts’ medium. The data analyses were carried out on Microsoft Excel, to perform calculations and visualize the results by putting the data into tables and charts. The results were also normalised in order to correctly compare them. The findings suggest that the Spanish learners make more errors than the German learners, but both groups produce the errors mostly in the spoken medium. The results are also discussed in relation to some theories and hypotheses coming from the field of Second Language Acquisition. The dissertation concludes by presenting some possible causes for this error type and some possible solutions to overcome it.