Interesting that when an FCE student puts "Dear my friend" it might get logged:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/st ... 68,00.html
though this seems to have come from The Department of the Bleedin' Obvious:
"Recent research shows that learners tend to use core words such as "big", "nice" and "bad" far more frequently than expert writers"
Gosh!
Pity that spoken errors don't get the same treatment from Cambridge.
Error Corpora
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fluffyhamster
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Thanks for that, JTT (as you're doubtless aware, I'm pretty interested in corpus linguistics generally - who isn't nowadays! - and lexicography in particular). I hadn't realized that Barbara Seidlhofer and her colleagues at the U of Vienna had actually set up a corpus of international spoken English ('VOICE' - the 'O' standing for "in collaboration with OUP"). 
But whilst that's all very interesting, I am a bit wary of people saying stuff like 'there is a significant overlap between the things that speakers of ELF (English as Lingua Franca) often do and the features that are identified as the "most common grammatical errors" in the CLC. (They include omission of articles, the use/misuse (depending on your point of view) of prepositions and the use/misuse of common verbs such as make, do and have' - there is a difference between analysing the usage of proficient speakers and discovering that - gasp - even they occassionally slip up over e.g. articles, and poring over every problem that obviously less able students have (I mean, if you recorded me speaking my broken Japanese you could have a field day with the "data"). It just isn't clear at which point there is a (or any) cut-off - but I suppose one could argue equally that given the resources, nothing should be excluded from an analysis.
But whilst that's all very interesting, I am a bit wary of people saying stuff like 'there is a significant overlap between the things that speakers of ELF (English as Lingua Franca) often do and the features that are identified as the "most common grammatical errors" in the CLC. (They include omission of articles, the use/misuse (depending on your point of view) of prepositions and the use/misuse of common verbs such as make, do and have' - there is a difference between analysing the usage of proficient speakers and discovering that - gasp - even they occassionally slip up over e.g. articles, and poring over every problem that obviously less able students have (I mean, if you recorded me speaking my broken Japanese you could have a field day with the "data"). It just isn't clear at which point there is a (or any) cut-off - but I suppose one could argue equally that given the resources, nothing should be excluded from an analysis.