The developement of a grammar checker for Spanish secondary students of English as a foreing lenguage

Abstract

This article outlines the development of a grammar checker for Spanish secondary school students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Since conventional parser-based grammar checkers cannot provide reliable feedback on the compositions written by students at this level, databases of common errors found by the analysis of a corpus of students' written work were constructed and feedback on each error was written. Tests suggested that such databases and feedback would enable many errors of many students at this level to be corrected, encouraging the preparation of an on-line grammar checker program. Directions for future research leading to improvement of the grammar checker are suggested.