Abstract

This paper presents a Computer Aided Error Analysis ( CEA) study based on Spanish as a Foreign Language Learners' Corpus. The corpus is made up of 84 summary texts: 40 of them are of expository modality, 22 narrative and 22 argumentative. These were written in Spanish by 22 international students from diverse university study programs with a B1 language proficiency level, enrolled in a b-learning Spanish as a foreign language course at Universidad de Concepcion, Chile (ele.udec.cl). The writing computerized tasks involved the production of 250-word-summaries based on scientific, historical and cultural topics that learners were asked to read. The methodology included Computer Aided Error Analysis and Computer Learner Corpora proceedings for the corpus construction, linguistic annotation and data processing using the NVIVO software tools. The aim is to determine error types, with the highest frequency of occurrence, committed by learners of Spanish as a foreign language. The corpus processing results suggest errors with the highest frequency correspond to orthographical stress-marking errors, followed by grammatical errors; such as, prepositions, grammatical agreement, verbs and articles. These findings will have implications in the delimitation, identification and treatment of errors with the use of an intelligent tutorial system for Spanish as a foreign language.