Part-of-speech Sequences and Distribution in a Learner Corpus of English

Computer learner corpora have been widely used by SLA/EFL specialists since mid 1990s to gain better insights into authentic learner language. The work presented in this paper examines the inter-language of Taiwanese learners of English from a part-of-speech sequence perspective. Two pre-tagged corpora (one learner corpus and one native corpus) are involved in this work. The experimental results indicate that there are more than one third of eligible POS trigrams that are never practiced by the Taiwanese learners in their writing and the learners have stronger preference than native speakers in using pronouns, especially right after punctuations, verbs and conjunctions.