Error Analysis in a Digital Written Corpus of Virtual Community

Abstract

Virtual communities for language learning facilitate communicative practice in a second or foreign language in natural contexts. These virtual environments arise as a response to integration and globalization from the technological resources provided on the internet. In this article, digital texts from a virtual community are analyzed in order to determine the influence of L1 (English) on errors caused by negative transfer in writing produced by participants who want to improve their writing in Spanish as a Foreign Language (ELE). To this end, a study on computer-assisted error analysis was carried out, considering as the focus the identification of the most frequent interlinguistic etiological errors and the trend of misuse in a digital corpus made up of 100 texts. The results show that the most frequent negative transfer errors are the definite article and the preposition “a”. Regarding the article, the greatest problem observed corresponds to the omission in nouns of general topics. In relation to the preposition "a", a greater frequency was evidenced in the omission to introduce direct or indirect object of person and the false selection of the preposition "a" instead of the preposition "in".