The Analysis of Beninese Secondary School Students’ English Composition Skills: A Step Towards the Development of a Beninese Learner Corpus

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.