The Turkish EFL learners' use of determiners: A learner corpus-based study

This study intends to find out the Turkish EFL learners' use of determiners. The study will make use of the corpus-based techniques to analyse the use of determiners in the Turkish EFL learner written performance between A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2 Common European Framework (CEFR) levels of proficiency available in the related corpora of the Cambridge Learner Corpora. The participants of the study are Turkish EFL learners from A1-C2 CEFR proficiency level, the sub-corpora consist of data from 1993 – 2012 written in different genres such as argumentative essay, letters, story, advice, application, et cetera. Moreover, in the present study, descriptive and quantitative methods are used as the study dwells on analysing the frequency of the English determiner used and errors made in the Turkish EFL learners' sub-corpus and seeks to obtain reasons behind those errors. English determiners are words that accompany nouns or, in other words, are nouns modifiers which usually appear before noun phrases to specify or to serve as a reference of a noun. In addition, McGregor (1997), states that the term article is used for the special subcategory of determinatives that provide the most basic expression of definiteness and indefiniteness. In this study, the Turkish EFL learners' corpora were analysed, the use of English determiner (articles) frequency was determined, as the study dwelled on the over-/-underuse of English determiners (articles), through the use of Log-likelihood ratio and Type-token ratio, it is found that C1-C2 proficiency levels overused the English determiner (articles) compared to A1-A2 and B1-B2 CEFR proficiency levels. Moreover, regarding the error typologies found in the corpus, Missing Determiner (MD) is found to be more persistent than the other three determiner error typologies, these are, (UD, FD, and RD). At last, in the overall analysis of the English determiners (articles), the presents that the use of 'the' is more frequent the corpus. Also, the main reason behind the learners' overuse and overuse of the determiners was the influence of the o the learners' native language. Furthermore, in the implementation of corpus driving activities in teaching and learning English determiners (articles), it should experiment was carried out, the participants in the study were divided into two groups, and experimental group (corpus-driven techniques) and a control group (traditional method). A pre-test was done before the research process, after four weeks of teaching English determiners (articles) a post-test was conducted. it is realized that corpus-driven activities in teaching English determiners to Turkish EFL learners have a vital role in improving the learners' comprehension and the activities trigger them to produce more sentences to prove their understanding and use the target language beyond the classroom context.