This paper investigates
Beninese EFL students' writing abilities, using the Corpus Data with three
application software (Word Level Checker, AntConc, and Paper Rater) to analyze
them. A problematic issue in Beninese EFL classes is the students’ lack of academic
writing skills. For instance, negative language transfer, the lack of
vocabulary, grammar, to mention a few, often mislead them a lot. Also, most
Beninese EFL teachers find it challenging to incorporate large numbers of
writing assignments in their lessons plan, mainly because of the effort and
time required to evaluate them. As a result, most EFL learners hardly develop
their ability to convey information through text writing. In this paper, unlike the traditional ways of evaluating
students' writing abilities, the researcher uses the Corpus Data to analyze
them. The description focuses on the kinds of errors learners make and how
these errors change over time by comparing the 10th Grade students' writing to
those of the 13th Grade students. The results show that Beninese EFL learners
use low-level vocabulary than expected and excessive short length sentences.
The keyword list analysis, combined with the grammar check, reveals that most
respondents overuse articles and personal pronouns while misusing the plural in
their writing. Another significant finding is that the 10th Grade students
demonstrate less accuracy than the 13th Grade students by overusing the passive
voice. This paper eventually suggests some operational solutions to improve
Beninese EFL learners’ writing ability.
Funding
Japanese Government MEXT Scholarship (September 2019 - March 2021)/ Chiba University, Japan