School of Humanities/School of Education Bachelor thesis

GI1313 15 points

Date: 05.06.08

Department of English Supervisor: Anna Wärnsby Examiner: Ibolya Maricic

Capital mistakes

The analysis of mistakes in the written production of advanced Swedish ESL learners at university level with focus on the use of

capital letters

Erik Söderlind

Abstract Title: Capital mistakes - The analysis of mistakes in the written production of

advanced Swedish ESL learners at university level with focus on the use of capital letters

Author: Erik Söderlind Abstract: The purpose of this essay was to see what mistakes Swedish university students

make when writing English essays and to focus on one specific mistake, namely

the use of capital letters. Fifty essays written by students of Swedish origin were

taken from the SWICLE (the Swedish Component of the International Corpus of

Learner English), corrected and the mistakes were subsequently analysed.

Furthermore, six Swedish school book series were examined in order to find

examples of how Swedish pupils are taught how to use capital letters in English.

The results showed that mistakes concerning capital letters were very common

compared to other mistakes and that the students in the study seemed to have

grasped some grammatical rules on the matter, but not all. Other common

mistakes made in the essays were spelling mistakes and choice of words. Most

common among the mistakes concerning capital letters were overuse of capital

lettering and the lack of initial capital letters when writing weekdays, months

and holidays. Only one out of the six school book series went deeper into the

matter of when to use capital letters in English, which suggests that one of the

reasons why capital letter mistakes are so common might be that the students are

not extensively taught on the matter.

Keywords: Foreign language learning, English as a second language, error analysis, native

language influence, capital letters.

Table of contents

1. INTRODUCTION 3

1.1 Aim and scope 4

2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 5

2.1 Contrastive Analysis and its problems 6

2.2 Error Analysis 7

2.3 The Interlanguage Hypothesis 7

2.4 Positive/negative transfer 8

2.5 Common mistakes made by Swedish learners of English 10 2.5.1 Spelling 10 2.5.2 Punctuation 10 2.5.3 Order of constituents 11 2.5.4 Nouns – count/mass distinction and number 11 2.5.5 Articles 11 2.5.6 Pronouns and determiners 11 2.5.7 Verbs 11 2.5.8 Prepositions 12

2.6 The use of capital letters in English 12

3. MATERIAL AND METHOD 14

3.1 The SWICLE 14

3.2 Correcting the essays 15

4. RESULTS 16

4.1 Mistakes in the text 16 4.1.1 Spelling 16 4.1.2 Choice of words and idioms 17 4.1.3 Verb forms and tenses 17 4.1.4 Articles 18 4.1.5 Prepositions 19 4.1.6 Punctuation 19 4.1.7 Nouns, count/mass distinction and number 20 4.1.8 Order of constituents 20 4.1.9 Pronouns 21 4.1.10 Words missing and question marks 21

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4.2 Misuse of capital letters 21 4.2.1 Overuse of capital letters 22 4.2.2 Underuse of capital letters in weekdays, months and holidays 22 4.2.3 Underuse of capital letters in nationals, languages and nationalities 23 4.2.4 Capital I in first person singular, subject form 23 4.2.5 Religions, political parties and their members 24 4.2.6 Words unaccounted for 24

4.3 Capital letters in school books 24

5. SUMMARY OF THE RESULTS 26

6. DISCUSSION 27

LIST OF REFERENCES 31 APPENDIX A - TABLES OF MISTAKES APPENDIX B – SWICLE ESSAYS USED

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1. Introduction More than 2000 years have passed since Seneca the younger coined his famous quote “errare

humanum est”. It is still, however, used today, even though it has lost its original meaning of

pointing out the difference between divinity and humanity. This quote is the springboard for

this essay. It is important to bear in mind when reading this essay that all humans make

mistakes. If they did not, there would be nothing to write about, no basis to start from.

School pupils today are told that making mistakes is a crucial feature of learning, not least

when learning languages. The red blob on the side of a paper handed in focuses the attention

of the pupil and starts a process of thought which hopefully leads to a new level of

understanding of the problem. In essence, pupils learn by their mistakes. In addition, what

mistakes a person makes can reveal many things to a researcher, for example where the

‘perpetrator’ is from and what level of English she or he has attained. There are, depending on

how you count, about five thousand languages in the world today, each and every one of them

different from the others. It would be natural to think that when learning a second language,

the mistakes a learner makes are related to his or her first language. This has, however, been

much debated and the different standpoints are further discussed in Section 2.

For all teachers of English everywhere, not just in Sweden, it is essential to know what

mistakes are actually made by the students in order to help them improve. This study,

however, is primarily focused on Swedish schools and Swedish ESL (English as a Second

Language) learners. In order to evaluate the results of a minimum of nine years of schooling

in the subject of English (which is compulsory in Swedish schools today), the writer of this

essay chose to look at the ‘finished product’, i.e. the mistakes made by students when they

have left upper secondary school which was conducted by looking at essays written by

Swedish university ESL learners. Note that in order to be able to analyse more easily how the

Swedish language affects Swedish ESL learners, only native speakers of Swedish were

chosen as subjects for this study.

To relate my findings to theories of acquisition, the empirical study of mistakes in

university essays was combined with research on what might be the reason for the mistakes. It

was not, however, possible to look at all types of mistakes made by students and so, one of

the more common mistakes; the misuse of capital letters, was focused on and the writer also

investigated how Swedish school books present or deal with the problem. The full version of

the quote mentioned at the start of this introduction is Errare humanum est, perseverare

diabolicum. To err is human, to persist is diabolical. We would not like students to become

devilish, would we?

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1.1 Aim and scope The aim of this essay is threefold. Firstly, the essay is focused on what mistakes of possible

native language interference are made by Swedish ESL learners that have left the Swedish

school system. This is done by looking at 50 essays produced by Swedish ESL learners at the

second year of university level. The corpus used in the study (the SWICLE, see Section 3.1)

only contains essays written by third and fourth term university students of English, which is

why no first year students are represented in the study. The second aim is to see if one type of

mistake, the misuse of capital letters, is a common mistake that Swedish learners of English

make and the study will also try to determine whether this problem might be caused by native

language interference through examining each occurrence of such a mistake in more detail.

Hypothetically, capital letter mistakes are easily spotted and therefore chosen as the focus of

this study. Thirdly, the writer of this essay aims to look at how the specific ‘mistake’, i.e. the

misuse of capital letters, is presented in Swedish school books in order to see if there is a link

between the mistakes and the way this issue is presented to the students. The writer is aware

that teachers use other teaching material than school books, but the presentation of this issue

in the books will, hopefully, give indications on how Swedish schools deal with the problem.

With all of this in mind, the research questions of this essay are as follows:

1. What mistakes are made in the selected university essays written by Swedish ESL

learners?

2. Is the misuse of capital letters a common mistake made by Swedish ESL learners in

the present data?

3. In what contexts does the misuse of capital letters occur?

4. How is the use of capital letters in English presented in Swedish school books?

In order to allow for a better understanding of the field of linguistics dealing with errors and

mistakes in language learning, theories and concepts within the field are discussed in Section

2.

The study was conducted on the basis of 50 essays written by advanced Swedish ESL

learners at Swedish universities. These were taken from the SWICLE, the Swedish

Component of the International Corpus of Learner English (see Section 3.1). Thus, the essay

does not look at essays of students in upper secondary school, but rather at the finished

‘product’; what the end result is after nine years of education in the subject of English. The

essays chosen were all timed and written without the aid of a dictionary or grammar book.

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This allowed the writer to get a result as close as possible to the actual level of knowledge of

the writers.

As both Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis (presented in Sections 2.1 and 2.2) are in

essence standpoints on what mistakes really are and how they should be treated by the teacher

and the learner, it would be natural to think that this essay aims to prove or disprove either

theory. However, even though this is a didactics essay, it does not attempt to set guidelines for

how teachers should treat occurrences of mistakes made by their students. What the essay

tries to do is simply to show what mistakes are made and in what contexts learners make

them, what the teacher then chooses to do with the newfound knowledge is up to her or him.

2. Theoretical background A teacher may seem malicious to his or her students if he or she focuses only on what

mistakes are made in texts written by the language learners, instead of focusing on what the

students have done well, but this is not necessarily the case. Mistakes made by students may

reveal to the teacher what level of proficiency the students have and thus, what needs to be

practiced further. However, the analysis of such mistakes should not be conducted without

reflection. Ellis (1997: 17), for example, advocates a distinction between a mistake and an

error. Mistakes, he claims, are simply the result of slips of the tongue, and must not be seen as

the result of a faulty interpretation of the grammatical rules of the second language.

Moreover, the speaker or writer who has made a mistake may self-correct since the rules

applicable are actually known to her or him. On the other hand, an error, according to Ellis

(1997: 17), is the result of a gap in the knowledge of the learner; she or he is basically

unaware of the correct form. So what then of instances when, in a text, a learner uses both the

correct and the incorrect form? Ellis considers this a mistake, since the learner clearly knows

the correct form. He does not, however, explore the possibility that the learner knows both

forms but is unsure which one to use and therefore alternates between them in order to get at

least some answers correct. Ellis continues by saying that one way to test whether a deviating

form is a mistake or an error is to ask the learner to correct him-/herself.1

The study of mistakes performed by second language learner (henceforth referred to as ‘L2

learners’) of English can also be said to be the study of how the first language (hereafter ‘L1’)

influences the language learning process. Throughout the last century, many theories on how 1 Note that due to the small amount of text each writer has produced in the essays used in this paper, it is almost impossible to distinguish between an error and a mistake and the term ‘mistake’ will therefore be used throughout the entire essay, unless the distinction is specifically mentioned.

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to evaluate and analyse such mistakes or errors have been suggested, two of them being

Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis. The latter was developed when the validity of

Contrastive Analysis was questioned (Skoog, 2006: 3 - 4). In order to better understand the

analysis of mistakes and errors in the field of linguistics, the following section also contains

explanations of concepts that are often used in the research in this field. One important term

in this respect is interlanguage. The Interlanguage Hypothesis states that an L2 learner

constructs sentences in which are found forms neither fully explainable by L1 nor by L2 rules

(Ellis 1997: 33). Positive and negative transfer are two other important terms, describing how

an L2 learner takes structures from her or his L1 and applies them to the L2 (Ellis 1997: 19).

Sometimes, this leads to correct phrases being formed (positive transfer) but not always. An

incorrect phrase being formed this way is an example of negative transfer. All of these terms

are further discussed in this section, along with a list of rules on how to use capital letters in

English and in Swedish and also what mistakes are commonly made by Swedish learners of

English.

2.1 Contrastive Analysis and its problems The essential focus of Contrastive Analysis is the idea that the L1 of the learner greatly

influences the learning of the L2 (Odlin 1989: 15). To a contrastivist (i.e. a person dealing

with Contrastive Analysis (James, 1980: 1)) comparing the mother tongue of a learner with

his or her L2 will allow the teacher or researcher not only to explain why learners may

experience difficulties when acquiring an L2, but also to predict future mistakes (Skoog 2006:

2). However, this also means that focus is put on the negative way in which L1 influences L2,

disregarding the positive effect it might have. Furthermore, early focus in Contrastive

Analysis, during the 1950s and 60s, was put on pronunciation and grammar and was aimed at

eradicating influences from the L1 (Odlin 1989: 16). Even though most linguists eventually

abandoned Contrastive Analysis in favour of a more positive approach to mistakes, it has

exercised a major influence in the field and might therefore be used to better understand

recent research (Skoog 2006: 3).

Another major problem in Contrastive Analysis was that it saw all mistakes performed by

L2 learners as a result of influences from their L1 (Odlin 1989: 17). During the 1970s, this

notion was questioned by several researchers, who also claimed that it was very difficult to

predict when and where the learner would make mistakes. It seemed as if what might be a

problem for English learners of Spanish, for example the two different translations of the

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word know (conocer and saber) was in fact not a problem for Spanish learners of English.2

This meant that the differences between the two languages were not enough to predict or

explain where difficulties might arise. In the end, the criticism of Contrastive Analysis lead to

the development of other forms of mistake and error evaluation (Skoog 2006: 3).

2.2 Error Analysis According to James (1998: 1), an error can be defined as “an unsuccessful bit of language”

making the field of Error Analysis a study of “the process of determining the incidence,

nature, causes and consequences of unsuccessful language” (James 1998: 1). As mentioned

earlier, Error Analysis was one of the disciplines that followed the decreased application of

Contrastive Analysis in linguistics. No longer solely focusing on the influence of the L1, error

analysts also tried to come up with other, alternative, explanations as to why mistakes, or

errors, were made (Odlin, 1989: 18). One example of this is the transfer of training, where the

teacher’s questions are followed by a direct and sometimes faulty response as can be seen in

this example from Odlin (1989:18):

1) Teacher: Am I your teacher?

Learner: Yes, I am your teacher!

Another important difference between error analysists and contrastivists is that the former do

not attempt to predict mistakes or errors, but rather explain why they happened and thereby

learn more about how languages are actually learnt3 (Skoog 2006: 3-4). Furthermore, Skoog

points out that Error Analysis is based on the idea that learning an L2 creates an independent

language system in the learner, which lays the foundation for another important term in this

field of linguistics.

2.3 The Interlanguage Hypothesis The American linguist Larry Selinker coined the term ‘interlanguage’ when he realised that

many mistakes L2 learners made could not be explained by solely looking at L1 or L2

structures and that the learners thus create unique language systems (Ellis 1997: 33).

2 In this specific example, however, this can easily be deduced from the fact that there is only one word to choose from in English, i.e. know. 3 Note that there is a difference between learning and acquiring a language, the latter is set in a naturalistic, untutored environment and the former implies teaching ( James 1980: 24).

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Essentially, advocates of the Interlanguage Hypothesis argue that a completely new system of

mental grammar is not created when learning a new language. Rather, it is initially based on

the L1 system and, subsequently, changes into a system of its own. Furthermore, it is under

the influence of input of new pieces of language from the L2 and thus constantly evolves and

develops (or, as some research has claimed, new interlanguages are formed all the time). This

creates the so-called language continuum where new rules for language are created, tweaked

and deleted. However, interlanguage may also stop evolving, hindering the learner from

progressing in the development of her or his understanding of the L2. This phenomenon is

called language fossilisation and, once again according to Ellis (1997: 34) this happens, at

some stage, to about 95 percent of all L2 learners. The remaining five percent are said to

move on to having virtually the same mental grammar as native speakers.

The notion of overgeneralization, also a characteristic of young children’s L1 acquisition,

is part of the interlanguage theory and basically means that a language learner uses a known

L2 rule but uses it in a context where a native speaker would not (Skoog, 2006: 7). It may

occur on the phonetic level (with the pronunciation of sounds at the end of words native

speakers would keep silent), on the grammatical level (such as the overuse of the –ing form in

English) and also on the lexical level, where a known word may be used to denominate items

not usually included in the same category (a goose may be called a chicken and a teaspoon

can be said to be a little spoon). Overgeneralization may also occur on a more pragmatic

level. A native speaker of English might, for example, have problems with the distinction

between tu and vous in French and similarly with du and Sie in German, all four examples

being a less or more formal way of saying you (Skoog 2006: 7).

2.4 Positive/negative transfer Transfer can be seen as an attempt by the learner to use the knowledge of previously learnt

languages, most importantly their L1, in order to construct pieces of the L2 (Ellis 1997: 19).

Another term for language transfer is cross-linguistic influence (Skoog 2006: 4). Furthermore,

the importance of transfer in L2 learning and acquisition has been very much debated, some

claiming that it is paramount in learning and others saying it is of less importance, if at all

(Odlin 1989: 3). The main reason for this last statement might be that not all mistakes made

are based on the L1 and that the faulty constructions that appear in L2 learners’ production are

also sometimes found in L1 learners and then referred to as overgeneralization. Skoog (2006:

4) however, claims that current research points to transfer being one of many factors

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influencing L2 learning, the others not yet being fully explored and defined. Transfer is,

however, no longer seen as being a concept that can explain mistakes in L2 learning.

So how does transfer really help learners acquire or learn a new language? The answer

depends on what kind of transfer is meant. Similarities in vocabulary help learners understand

L2 texts faster, similarities in pronunciation help learners grasp the native speech more

quickly and similarities in syntactic structures allow learners to master the grammar of the L2

more quickly. These are just a few random examples of how similarities aid L2 learners

(Odlin, 1989: 36).

When it comes to negative transfer (or, as it is also called, interference), that is, transfer of

language units from L1 which are not correct in the L2, Odlin (1989: 36-38) identifies four

main categories of the transfer mentioned. Underproduction (also known as avoidance

strategy) means that the learner, being so distant from the target language, avoids or refrains

from using certain structures in the L2 so as to not make mistakes. This results in language

production divergent from the language norm. However, the speech or text produced has

comparatively few mistakes, mainly because the learner has avoided them. One example

mentioned by Odlin is Schachter’s 1974 study, where Korean and Japanese students produced

very few, or no, relative clauses compared to learners with native tongues closer to English.

The opposite of underproduction is, of course, overproduction, where structures appear

more often than in native speech. Drawing once again on the Japanese speakers, Odlin claims

that they produce far too many simple sentences instead of relative clauses. Another example

mentioned is English speakers of Hebrew, who apologise as often in their L2 as in their L1,

thus deviating from Hebrew norms.

The most common case of negative transfer is the production error. Odlin identifies three

main types of this transfer, namely substitutions, calques and alterations of structures. When

a learner removes an L2 word or structure from a sentence and replaces it with a word from

his or her L1, a substitution has been made. Odlin exemplifies this by presenting a sentence

from a Swedish learner of English as a Second Language (ESL):

2) But sometimes I must go bort. (Odlin 1989: 37)

The learner has replaced the English word away with the Swedish equivalent bort.

The notion of calque (also known as loan-translation) is similar but features the mistake

on a sentence level, where word order or idiomatic expressions are simply taken from the L1

and translated word for word. This might not produce sentences that are wrong in the

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grammatical but rather in the idiomatic sense. An example of this is the Spanish learner of

ESL who preferred to use the form the porch of Carmen instead of the more idiomatically

correct English form Carmen’s porch. The last type of production errors is alterations of

structures which do not include a direct influence of the L1 but rather the L2 learners’

overcompensation in their effort to produce correct language. One example of this is

hypercorrection, where the language learner is aware of a phonetical transfer problem and

tries to compensate for it, but in doing so tries so hard that a new problem arises. This can be

seen in Arabic speakers of English who sometimes confuse the phoneme /b/ with that of /p/

allowing for spelling mistakes such as *blaying4 and *hapit.

The final category of negative transfer is misinterpretation, where the learner due to

cultural, syntactic or phonetic differences between the two languages misinterprets a message

or constructs a piece of language that means something different than what was intended.

2.5 Common mistakes made by Swedish learners of English As the English and Swedish languages both have developed from the Germanic branch of the

Indo-European language tree they are very similar in construction (Swan and Smith 2001: 21)

and close contacts between the languages over the past centuries have resulted in them being

tied even closer to each other. However, there are a few differences which result in common

mistakes for Swedish learners of English. This section will include a few of these occurrences

where the two languages differ from each other. The categorizations are taken from Swan and

Smith (2001: 21-36).

2.5.1 Spelling

Swedish uses the letter k in many instances where English uses c which results in mistakes

such as *kannibal (Swan and Smith 2001: 26). Also, Swedish learners, once having

discovered the phonological distinction between w and v, tend to overuse w since this sounds

more ‘English’, resulting in mistakes such as *wolley ball.

2.5.2 Punctuation

Most Swedish compounds are written as one word which has as a result that learners have

trouble with spacing in between words and overuse the hyphen such as in *fire-alarm and

*frontdoor (Swan and Smith 2001: 26). Also belonging to this category is the use of

4 The * symbol indicates a faulty construction.

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apostrophes which is far more common in English than in Swedish, resulting in mistakes

when using the genitive such as *That is Susans cat.

2.5.3 Order of constituents

Swedish word order differs in some respects from that of English. One example of this is that

other clause elements than the subject of a sentence can be fronted in Swedish (Swan and

Smith 2001: 26-27). Normally, only adverbials are fronted in English in this way, something

which seldom causes subject-verb inversion (with the exception of when negative or

restrictive adverbials are present). An example of this is *That have I not seen. Naturally,

Swedish ESL learners have trouble fronting adverbials as well.

2.5.4 Nouns – count/mass distinction and number

Differences occur between Swedish and English on several occasions when it comes to the

distinction between countables and uncountables, singular and plural (Swan and Smith 2001:

27). This leads to mistakes such as: *informations, *many money, and *public expenditures.

2.5.5 Articles

There are several examples of where the English use of the definite article differs from the

Swedish use, one of them being the use of the definite article before an uncountable or plural

noun (Swan and Smith 2001: 28). The use of the indefinite article differs as well in some

aspects, especially in idiomatic expressions. Both may be seen in the following examples: *a

man with hat and *People blame the society for everything.

2.5.6 Pronouns and determiners

Swedish lacks a distinction between who and which and also between any and some (Swan

and Smith 2001: 30). Moreover, Swedish has a completely unspecific personal pronoun

(‘man’) which corresponds to the English general use of you, one and they. Finally, English

uses a possessive determiner in some cases where Swedish does not, resulting in mistakes

such as the following: *He put the hand in the pocket.

2.5.7 Verbs

As there is no inflection for person or number in Swedish verbs, learners sometimes make the

mistake of dropping the –s in the third person singular, for example in the following

construction: *He go to school every day. Additionally, the Swedish equivalent of the –ing

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form is very limited in use, resulting in continuous mistakes regarding this (Swan and Smith

2001: 31).

2.5.8 Prepositions

The use of prepositions differs somewhat between Swedish and English; prepositions are for

example sometimes followed by the equivalent of a that-clause (att-clause) in Swedish,

resulting in the following type of mistake: *He convinced me of that he was innocent.

Prepositions may also be followed by an infinitive and in passive sentences, the agent is

introduced by the preposition av (of) which leads to mistakes like the following: *The bone

was eaten of the dog. Moreover, the very common preposition i is often exchanged for other

prepositions than in (an example of this is: *go in school).

As some common mistakes for Swedish ESL learners have now been presented, the study

moves on to describing one mistake in more detail, namely that of where English and Swedish

uses capital letters.

2.6 The use of capital letters in English The English language uses capital letters in many instances where Swedish does not. In order

to better understand the mistakes made by Swedish ESL learners, it is important to first know

where the two languages differ in this respect. The following rules for the use of capital letters

in English, and the examples, were taken from Ljung and Ohlander (1992: 322). The

examples in English and their Swedish equivalents are shown in italics.

1. In English, the first personal pronoun I is spelled with a capital letter whereas the Swedish

equivalent jag is not.

2. In English, all week days, months and holidays are capitalized, something which is not

done in Swedish. It is also important to note that in English, all words in semantically related

compounds are capitalized. Examples of this are Monday (måndag), January (januari) and

Christmas Day (juldagen).

3. In the English language, all nationalities, languages and other words that are connected

with nations begin with a capital letter. This means that English capitalises Swahili whereas

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Swedish does not (swahili). The same goes for a Frenchman (en fransos/fransman) and the

Swedes (svenskarna).

4. All words derived from proper nouns are capitalized in English but not in Swedish. This

means that the word Londoner translates as londonbo without a capital letter and the same

goes for Marxism (marxism).

5. Religions, political parties and their supporters are all spelled with an initial capital letter in

English but not in Swedish, unless the word is a proper noun. This means that the Liberal

Party is spelled with capital letters in English, but not in Swedish (liberalerna). However, the

Swedish Liberal Party (Folkpartiet) is a proper noun and thus capitalised. Similarly, all words

for religious groups and their followers begin with a capital letter in English (e.g. Islam) but

not in Swedish (islam).

6. All words or abbreviations connoting family relations put before a name, such as Mr and

Aunt are capitalised in English but not in Swedish (herr, faster). This also applies to titles

such as General and Doctor.

7. When naming major buildings, institutions and organisations, English chooses to capitalise

all words in such compounds whereas Swedish capitalises the first letter in the first word and,

more often than not, creates a single word from the various subunits. This means that the

Ministry of Defence translates as Försvarsministeriet and the World Health Organisation

turns into Världshälsoorganisationen.

8. Some, but not all, established concepts in history, culture and society are spelled with

initial capital letters in English, something which never happens in Swedish unless the

concept is an initialism, for example fotbolls-VM (World Cup of Football). The Stone Age

however, being an established concept in history, takes the capital letter whereas its Swedish

translation (stenåldern) does not.

9. The most important words in titles of literary and musical works, films etc. all have initial

capital letters in English, but in Swedish, only the first letter in the first word is capital. The

musical The Phantom of the Opera thereby translates as Fantomen på operan.

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Overall, smaller words like articles, monosyllabic prepositions and the word and usually

have lower case letters in English and this applies to compounds as well.

10. In English compound words, unlike Swedish ones, all the elements have initial capital

letters. The United Nations is for example spelled Förenta nationerna in Swedish.

These differences between the use of capital letters in English and Swedish are henceforth

referred to as rules number 1-10. Now having established the theoretical background of the

study, I move on to describing how the study was performed.

3. Material and method This section describes the data used in this study. It also addresses what problems arose when

dealing with the analysis of the data and how they were dealt with. Finally, a discussion is

made on how the material was analysed.

3.1 The SWICLE The student essays used as data in this study were taken from the SWICLE, the Swedish

component of the ICLE, the International Corpus of Learner English. The ICLE-project was

initiated in 1990 by Sylvaine Granger at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium

(Lunds universitet, 2008 [www]). Its purpose was to collect corpora of texts produced by

advanced learners of English with different language backgrounds. Thus, texts were collected

from 14 different countries including Russia, China, Finland, Italy and Germany. The

Swedish component includes 355 essays on various topics, produced by third or fourth term

university students of English. The essays were collected at three Swedish universities;

Gothenburg, Lund and Växjö. Another feature of the SWICLE is that all essays in the

database have learner profiles, telling the researcher the gender, native language, language

spoken at home, proficiency in other languages etc. of the writer. Additionally, there is also

information concerning the text including title, length, if a dictionary was used and whether it

was timed or not. Since the purpose of this essay was to find out what mistakes were made by

Swedish learners of English, only papers by writers of Swedish origin, with Swedish as their

L1 and those who spoke mainly Swedish at home were chosen. However, papers by writers

who had one non-native Swedish parent and speaking Swedish at home were also accepted. If

a writer had one parent with a different language background than Swedish but only

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communicated with the parent in Swedish, I considered this to have a very small impact on

the language of the child (and thus on the essay written by him or her), making it unimportant

for the purpose of this study. Furthermore, all essays in the study were written without the use

of a dictionary of any sort. This (together with the fact that the chosen essays were timed)

ensures the spontaneity of the mistakes produced. Thus, 50 essays were chosen for the study

(for a list of what essays were used, see Appendix B). These included 26728 words in total,

with an average of 534.5 words per essay. The highest number of words in an essay was 895

and the lowest was 371. With these numbers at hand, it was time to see what mistakes had

been made by the writers.

3.2 Correcting the essays After the essays were chosen I corrected them. While doing so, I focused on problems that

might arise due to L1 influence such as word order, spelling, choice of words etc. (see Section

2.5). Less energy was spent on correctly marking mistakes that would be mistakes in both

Swedish and English, including faulty use of full stops, run-on sentences, construction of texts

etc. When I was in doubt whether a construction was correct or not, I turned to the Cambridge

Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (Cambridge University Press, 2005) to find the correct form.

One of the most frequent mistakes that might be due to L1 interference was the use of capital

letters, surpassed only by spelling mistakes. Since the spelling mistakes were quite varied and

hard to analyse, capital letter mistakes were therefore chosen as the main focus for the study.

As a tool for the classification of the mistakes found, I chose to use Swan & Smith’s study on

common mistakes made by Scandinavian learners of English (2001: 21-36, see Section 2.5)

and in order to classify mistakes concerning capital letters, I used Ljung & Ohlander (1992:

322, see Section 2.6). It is, of course, possible that I missed several occurrences of mistakes,

and even types of mistakes, when I made corrections. However, the occasional lapse in

correcting is of less significance since the main focus of this essay is qualitative, not

quantitative. What is focused on is not the frequency of mistakes (even though information is

displayed in two tables in Appendix A), but rather in what contexts mistakes concerning the

use of capital letters are made.

15

4. Results This section includes presentations of all the data gathered in the study. Firstly, all mistakes

found in the essays that were not connected to the use of capital letters are presented since that

is also part of the study. Secondly, a more in-depth presentation of the mistakes when using

capital letters is undertaken. Finally, the issue of how Swedish school books have presented

and dealt with the problem of capital letters is addressed. Note that there might be several

mistakes in every example. However, only the ones with relevance to the paragraph in

question have been underlined.

4.1 Mistakes in the text A total of 324 mistakes, including those where the writer failed or forgot to use capital letters

in a correct way, were found in the 50 essays, which means that an average of 6.48 mistakes

were made per essay. The actual number of mistakes per essay ranged from nil to 22. In the

following Sections (4.1.1 – 4.1.10), a brief summary of these mistakes will be presented, not

including those mistakes that had to do with the use of capital letters. The division into

various categories follows that of Swan and Smith (2001: 26-34, see Section 2.5) but another

category, Choice of words and idioms, not included in the book has been added in order to

account for the mistakes encountered in the data. A table of all mistakes excluding those of

capital letters is seen in Appendix A.

4.1.1 Spelling

The most common mistakes made were by far various spelling mistakes which accounted for

98 instances, i.e. about a third of the total number of mistakes made at an average of 1.96

mistakes per essay (for details, view Table 1 in Appendix A). Some of these may have been

due to language interference whereas others might simply be careless mistakes or slips.

Almost all of the essays had at least one spelling mistake and two of them are featured below.

3) It seems, then, that one key to a solution is dependance.

4) Quality mobil phones are not sold to customers under a certain income.

Sentence (3) contains a mistake where the writer has probably spelled the word dependence as

she or he would pronounce it. (4) is an example of possible L1 influence since mobile is

spelled without a final e in Swedish.

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4.1.2 Choice of words and idioms

The second largest category of mistakes, not counting capital letters which will be presented

in more detail below, was that of choice of words and idioms. This category loosely includes

all sentences where a word was used which did not properly fit in the context and should have

been exchanged for another. Moreover, the category includes various sentences where set

expressions and idioms were used which either do not exist in the English language (i.e. are

directly translated from Swedish) or are phrased somewhat differently than in the actual

sentence. A total of 55 of these mistakes were discovered which meant that on average, about

1.1 of this type of faults was made per essay (for details, see Table 1 in Appendix A). The

mistakes accounted for about 17 per cent of the total number of mistakes. One example of

each of these three types is shown below.

5) Zen-Buddhism, ordinary Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Hare Krishna are examples

of “old” religious movements that have increased its number of members.

6) To blame it all on money might perhaps be to simple, there are always more than one

side on a coin.

7) The golden middle is what we should aim for and that means hard work for both

Swedes and immigrants.

In example five, the sentence might be more correct if the word ordinary were replaced by the

word common. The reason for the mistake the writer has made might be that both words have

the same translation in Swedish: ‘vanlig’. (6) contains an English idiom usually written as

‘There is always more than one side to a coin’ where the preposition on is replaced by to. (7)

includes a translation of the Swedish idiom ‘den gyllene medelvägen’ which directly

translates as the golden middle road but would be more suitable if replaced by strike the

golden mean.

4.1.3 Verb forms and tenses

The next category contains mistakes where the writer has somehow mixed up verbs in the text

or where a faulty tense or form has been used. 25 of these 39 mistakes are concord mistakes

where the wrong verb form is added to a noun or pronoun. Another eight are occasions where

the wrong verb has been used in a sentence. The final six are mistakes where the English

present participle (-ing) form has been used. In total, an average of 0.78 mistakes of this type

17

were made per essay accounting for 12 per cent of the total number of mistakes (for details,

view Table 1 in Appendix A). Examples of these three categories are shown below.

8) Even though the number of immigrants being allowed into the country have been

reduced, there are still many waiting for treatment of their applications.

9) It has, however, during the years since the fifties become considered, somewhat, of a

problem, since the immigration has increased and the job situation has decreased.

10) It leads to immigrant children, with a chance to become bilingual, lose their first

language and through that, also lose an important link to their culture.

(8) features a concord mistake where the word number (singular) is connected to the verb

have, which should be connected to a noun in the plural. (9) includes the verb decreased

which should perhaps be replaced by the verb worsened. Finally, (10) contains two occasions

of the word lose and the sentence might look better if these were replaced by the present

participle losing.

4.1.4 Articles

This category of mistakes includes cases where the wrong article has been used. In the data

chosen for the study, 20 such mistakes were made and most of them were faulty uses of the

definite article. The results indicate that the distinction between the indefinite articles a and

an is of little trouble for the Swedish university students, whereas the definite article is more

of a problem. An average of 0.4 mistakes were made per essay, i.e. six per cent of all mistakes

were of this type (for details, view Table 1 in Appendix A). The mistakes included both

situations where the definite article should have been used but was not and where it was used

but should not have been. One example of each is shown below.

11) The inbalance in the powerstructure in the areas where the Europeans and Americans

(people from the US) have been involved has produced many large conflicts like the

civilwar in Somalia and Lebanon and the coup d’etat in Chile and Nicaragua.

12) The new equality in the Western society

Just like a few other countries (the Ukraine, the Netherlands) the Lebanon takes the definite

article in English, something which is not found in Swedish and this might be the reason why

the writer has left out the definite article in (11). The title featured in (12) unnecessarily

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includes the definite article, the word society is in English an abstract uncountable noun used

generically and therefore does not take the definite article.

4.1.5 Prepositions

This category includes all mistakes where the wrong preposition was used in a sentence. A

total of 16 of these mistakes were discovered in the study which means that an average of

0.32 mistakes of this type were made in each essay accounting for five per cent of the total

number of mistakes (for details, view Table 1 in Appendix A). One example of a preposition

mistake is shown below.

13) Another example is the warning of too much sun exposure that has made people think

behind the immediate consequence of cancer to the more overall use of chemicals that

makes the ozon layer become thinner, which in its turn makes the sun more burning.

In this context, the preposition behind should perhaps be replaced by beyond.

4.1.6 Punctuation

Into the category Punctuation, Swan and Smith (2001: 26) not only put full stops and

semicolons, but also the use of the hyphen and of spacing in words that are usually

compounds in Swedish. Additionally, the use of apostrophes is also included in the category.

A total of 15 mistakes can be found in this category. This means that about 4.6 percent of all

mistakes where punctuation mistakes (for details, view Table 1 in Appendix A). One example

of each of the three types can be seen below.

14) Eventhough my grandfather did not have the opportunity to go to school he later

started his own business working with the timbre market.

15) As I see it, to-day’s young people and those of the next generation will not necessarily

suffer from the prevailing state of high unemployment.

16) Undoubtedly as I saw what three generations of unemployment does to people, heared

the teachers comments on their pupils in ways such as […].

In (14), the writer has mistakenly written the words even though as one word. In (15), a

hyphen has been used instead of writing the word today as one word. In (16), the writer has

19

forgotten the genitive s on the word teachers (teachers’). Alternatively, the writer of (16)

might have put an extra s on the word comment, changing it from a verb to a noun.

4.1.7 Nouns, count/mass distinction and number

This category included all those occasions where mistakes were made between uncountable

and countable nouns as Swedish and English differ somewhat between the two. Moreover, all

instances where a faulty singular or plural construction was used were also included in this

category. Moreover, one occasion of the faulty use of a numeral was included. A total of six

of these mistakes were made and two examples are featured below.

17) This essay deals solely with possible reasons for connections in our modern society in

the last decade of the 2000th century.

18) The meals are served at the same times, made by the same persons using the same

ingrediences as last christmas.

In (17), the writer has both the expression 20th century and the year 2000 at once. In (18), the

writer has taken the noun person, which in English exists only in the singular, and turned it

into a plural. However, the English plural of person is people.

4.1.8 Order of constituents

Only five mistakes where the writer had made a mistake of word order were found in the

essays, which reveal that this is not something Swedish university students have much trouble

with. However, one example of a faulty order of constituents is shown below.

19) How can we make Christmas of 1997 the most memorable Christmas we ever have

celebrated?

In the Swedish translation of the two words featured above, the word order would be that of

the sentence as it stands now since Swedish primarily uses the V2 rule but places the adverb

between the subject and verb in subclauses. This seems to be more of a problem if the

adverbial is long. In English however, the order of these two constituents should be reversed.

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4.1.9 Pronouns

Five mistakes where the writer had made mistakes of pronouns were found in the essays,

including three instances where the Swedish word som had been translated as which instead of

that or who. Two examples of faulty use of pronouns are shown below.

20) Zen-Buddhism, ordinary Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Hare Krishna are

examples of “old” religious movements that have increased its number of members.

21) Sects which strip their members of money are terrifyingly common nowadays.

In (20), the anaphora its should be replaced by their as the antecedent ‘old religious

movements’ is a plural noun phrase. In (21), which should be replaced by that since no

selection of sects has been presented.

4.1.10 Words missing and question marks

In this final category, seven mistakes can be found that cannot be placed in any other

category. These include occurrences where words are simply missing, maybe because of slips

by the writer, or where the writer has simply put a question mark instead of writing

something.

22) […] but since capitalism is considering nothing but profit, environmental have been

set aside.

After the word environmental there is a word missing. Suggested words to place here would

be issues or concerns.

4.2 Misuse of capital letters Section 2.6 described where Swedish and English differ when it comes to the use of capital

letters and this section will describe what and where mistakes of capital letters were made in

the essays. A total of 61 mistakes of capital letters were found in the essays with an average

of 1.22 mistakes per essay. The following Sections (4.2.1 - 4.2.6) will describe the instances

where mistakes involving capital letters were found in the essays. Take note that some

mistakes were repeated in the same texts, a person might spell the word Christmas without a

capital letter several times in the same essay. This was counted as several mistakes in the

21

study since a writer might sometimes spell a word correctly and sometimes not in the same

text. Details of all capital letter mistakes are available in Table 2 in Appendix A.

4.2.1 Overuse of capital letters

The largest category of capital letter mistakes was in fact mistakes where the writer overused

capital lettering. 18 such mistakes were found which is about 30 per cent of the total number

of capital letter mistakes (see Table 2 in Appendix A). Some cases of such overuse may be

seen in the following examples.

23) It might sound harsh to blame the Industrial revolution and therefore also the progress

of our society […]

24) Even if the Olympics would mean 3000 new jobs or more, this is only a temporary

solution of the unemployment problem, and only a drop in the unemployment Ocean.

25) There is a proposal from the Government of introducing the 35-hour work week

within the next ten years.

(23) shows a misinterpretation of Grammar rule no. 8 (concepts in history, society and

culture, see Section 2.6), the author understood the industrial revolution to be an established

historical concept in need of capital lettering. (24) can be considered faulty in the context of

writing an argumentative essay albeit it is ‘poetic’. (25) shows a misinterpretation of

Grammar rule no. 7 as the word government is not treated as an established institution in

English.

4.2.2 Underuse of capital letters in weekdays, months and holidays

The second largest group of mistakes of capital lettering was the overuse of capital lettering

when it came to weekdays, holidays and months. Primarily, the essays displayed faults when

it came to holidays. Of the 17 mistakes of this type found, only two pertained to something

other than holidays.

26) That is what christmas is all about.

27) (In Sweden, this is to be done at three different occasions, 1:st of Advent, Lucia and

Christmas eve).

28) But if you do that you have to skip it altogether […] with a coathanger or some other

sorry excuse for a christmastree.

22

Examples (26) – (28) display mistakes that can be related to the learners not fully being aware

of the English grammar rule of capitalizing holidays. (26) shows a clean break of the rule

whereas the writer of (27) probably treats 24 December as a Swedish compound thereby not

capitalizing the word ‘eve’. The writer of (28) correctly uses a capital ‘C’ at the beginning of

Christmas earlier in the text but alternates between the two forms throughout the essay.

4.2.3 Underuse of capital letters in nationals, languages and nationalities

The third largest group of mistakes when it comes to capital lettering pertained to words

connected to nationalities and languages. 16 such mistakes were found accounting for around

26 per cent of the total number of mistakes. Most common were mistakes where the writer

used lower-case letters in nationalities (29-30).

29) Where only 10-15 years ago, the term “melting pot” was used, in an american society

that still believed that assimilation was the right thing, they have now realized that

integration works.

30) My experiences, as a teacher in Swedish as a foreign language, are that those who live

in isolated groups with no swedish friends or colleagues never seem to learn Swedish very

well […].

Interestingly, the writer of (30) has used a lower case letter when discussing a nationality

(swedish) but capital letters when writing about the Swedish language. This may suggest that

the writer has not internalised the rule completely, or it might just be a ‘slip of the pen’.

4.2.4 Capital I in first person singular, subject form

Only two cases appeared where the writer had missed capitalizing ‘I’, contrary to English

grammar rules.

31) How stupid! i get it anyway.

32) One mistake which i often notice in political debates on all levels is that people tend

to mix up the term “equal” with “identical” or “the same”.

(31) may of course be a slip not related to language interference since the letter starts a new

sentence which means the word should have a capital letter in Swedish too. (32) on the other

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hand occurs in the middle of a sentence and may be due to language interference, even though

the writer correctly uses capital I in other sentences in the text.

4.2.5 Religions, political parties and their members

Only one example of misuse of capital letters with respect to the group ‘religions, political

parties and their members’ appeared in the study:

33) Also, they would all have to become protestants and abandon their religions, which is

an impossible thought, considering the fact that religion in many cases is the reason they

left their own countries originally.

As Protestants are members of a religious group, the word takes a capital letter in English.

The Swedish equivalent protestanter, however, is spelled with a lower case letter, something

which might be a reason for the mistake.

4.2.6 Words unaccounted for

This last group included two recorded words that do not belong in any of the groups

previously established. Two cases of the word ‘Internet’ spelled without a capital letter were

found, as well as five instances where the word ‘Earth’, as referring to the planet, was spelled

with lower case letters only. Both of these words are spelled with capital letters in Standard

English but, most of the time, with lower case letters in Swedish.

34) One thing which is important to remember is that the consuming society in which we

are living is not a threat to the earth.

35) […] and you need internet to be among the first to spot the job of your dream before

someone else does.

As all occurrences of the various mistakes have now been presented, I will move on to

describing how a few school books deal with the use of capital letters.

4.3 Capital letters in school books As a part of the result, this section deals with how the issue of capital letters has been

presented in Swedish school books. This might tell the reader something of how the Swedish

24

school system works with the problem. A random sample of twelve school book series of

English published in Sweden for lower and upper secondary school was selected and read

through. Most book series had one or more exercises where nationalities were practised,

naturally including capital lettering. However, only three of the books series dealt with capital

letters to a higher degree than that. In Action in Progress (Studentlitteratur: 2007) Hedencrona

et al. include a paragraph on capital letters in the grammar section at the back of the book. In

four sentences the book explains that capital letters are used when writing months, holidays

and weekdays, as well as when talking about nationalities, languages and countries. The book

has a total of 248 pages and is part of a series of several books aimed at upper secondary

school learners.

Tholin et al. also have a paragraph on the matter, presented in the middle of the book A

Piece of Cake Workbook 3 (Almqvist & Wiksell: 1996) aimed at grade nine pupils in lower

secondary school. Under the headline ‘When to use capital letters’, four types of capital letter

differences are put forth: in the word I, in days of the week, in months and in nationalities and

languages.

The most extensive presentation, in the study, of when to use capital letters is found in

Engelska 2 Övningsbok by Bergman et al. (Akademiförlaget: 1992) which is aimed at the

second course of English in upper secondary school. Moreover, an exercise on the matter is

added after the explanation which is placed in a grammar chapter at the back. The book

exemplifies six instances where capital letters occur in English but not in Swedish:

nationalities (and words thereof, such as languages); months, days and holidays; titles

followed by a name; words connoting famous things, people or institutions; important words

in titles of books, titles and headlines, etc., and finally both words in street names, etc.

Some of the books/series that were shown not to have a section on capital letters were:

Project X (Casselryd et al.: 1998, upper secondary school), Wings (Glover et al. 2003, lower

secondary school) and Get It Together (Cutler & Miller: 1994, lower secondary school). All

in all, the space provided for capital letters in the books examined was far from satisfying as

only nominal explanations of when to use capital letters were given in just a few of the books.

The topic will be further developed in the analysis part of the essay.

25

5. Summary of the results The aim of this investigation was threefold. The first aim was to identify what mistakes

caused by possible L1 interference were made by Swedish learners of English who had left

the Swedish school system. Secondly, the writer of the essay wanted to examine one of these

mistakes, namely the use of capital letters, in more detail in order to search for L1 interference

patterns. Thirdly, a closer look was to be made at a few school books in order to see how the

problems caused by differences between Swedish and English use of capital letters have been

dealt with and how this particular area is presented to Swedish learners of English. The study

was conducted by looking at fifty student essays from different Swedish universities,

correcting them and subsequently analysing and classifying the mistakes. Also, a number of

school books teaching English to Swedish learners were reviewed.

In order to reach the threefold aim presented in the previous paragraph, four research

questions were produced. Firstly, the writer of this essay wanted to look at what mistakes

were made in university essays by Swedish ESL learners and secondly, if the misuse of

capital letters was a common mistake made by the same learners. The third question dealt

with in what contexts the capital letter mistakes were made and the final question was about

how the differences between Swedish and English use of capital letters had been presented in

Swedish school books. This paragraph summarizes the results and briefly tries to answer the

questions.

The answer to the first research question (i.e. which were the most common mistakes for

Swedish ESL learners in the study to make) was, not surprisingly, spelling mistakes with

almost one hundred attested occurrences, followed most prominently by capital letter

mistakes, choice of word mistakes and verb mistakes. Article, preposition and punctuation

mistakes were also common, followed by the slightly less common mistakes on nouns, word

order and pronouns. For more detail, see Section 4.1 or the overview of all the mistakes in

Table 1 in Appendix A.

Questions two and three focused the study on the capital letter mistakes with 61 incidences

of varying types, which made it relatively common compared to other mistakes. The mistakes

occurred in all sorts of instances and both as overuse and underuse of capital letters. Among

the more common mistakes were those of not using capital letters when writing names of

holidays and also when writing names of languages, nationalities etc. This can be seen in

further detail in Section 4.2 and an overview of all capital letter mistakes is available in Table

2 in Appendix A.

26

Many of the school books examined for the purpose of finding out how the issue of capital

letters is presented did not address the topic at all. The majority of those that did went over

the issue briefly. Interestingly, the only book that both explained the different occurrences and

allowed the learners training on the topic with an exercise (Engelska 2, Bergman et al. 1992),

was the only book that the essay writers in the study could have had as a school book

themselves, having been published at the beginning of the 1990s.

6. Discussion In the essays, clear influences (or transfer) of L1 may be seen in examples (4), (5), (7), (19)

and possibly also (16). Additionally, almost all examples of underuse of capital letters are

examples thereof. This may indicate that most writers were, when producing the essays,

within a language continuum (see Section 2.3) and at the same time, had mental grammars

with parts from both their L1 and L2. This seems to prove that there is, in fact, an

interlanguage based on the L1, evolving into an L2 and that this interlanguage is completely

detached from both the L1 and the L2. Since the study was synchronic and not diachronic,

however, it is not possible to prove whether the writers were still evolving in the continuum

or if their L2 had fossilised. Some writers made no mistakes and their texts were close to

being, or even were, on the same level as that of a native speaker of English. However,

without a larger sample of texts produced over time, it cannot be proved that they were within

the five percent Ellis (1997: 34, see Section 2.3) established as the group that could move on

to having the same mental grammar as native speakers.

There were several examples indicating overgeneralization (see Section 2.4), most

prominently the overuse of capital letters. Some writers used capital letters where they were

not needed which was contrary to what could be expected, but this might simply be because

they had overextended the use of a rule known to them.

I was not able to find any clear examples of either under- or overproduction (see Section

2.4) of pieces of language in the essays. In order to quantatively prove the occurrence of such

structures I would need a considerably larger corpus together with a corresponding corpus

with text written by native speakers of English, something which the scope of this study did

not allow.

Some examples of production errors (see Section 2.4) may be seen, however. The level of

knowledge might be too high for students to substitute words or expressions with their

Swedish equivalents. Instead, they might work around the word in question and replace it

27

with other forms. Another possibility is that they simply put a question mark in place of the

word they could not retrieve (see Section 4.1.11). There was at least one clear example of

calque in the study (example (7)).

The mistakes in the essays seem to correspond well to the typical mistakes performed by

Swedish learners of English presented in Swan & Smith (2001: 21-36, see Section 2.5). Most

mistakes were represented, be that on a slightly higher level of competence than that

described in the book. The more specific mistakes in Ljung & Ohlander (1992: 322, see

Section 2.6), dealing with capital letters, where less often represented, however. Half of the

categories of differences between Swedish and English capital letter usage were not

represented in my data. This might also, of course, be due to the possibility that the learners

had acquired some rules but not others. The investigation was only focused on what the

learners had done wrong, not what they hade done correctly. Some mistakes, such as that of

holidays, for example, were represented to a higher degree than I had expected however and

the capital letter mistake was the second most common mistake, following spelling mistakes.

The fact that the capital letter mistake was so common in comparison to other mistakes

leads us to the final question posed in this study, namely how the use of capital letters is

presented in school books. The school books did not reveal many examples of paragraphs or

sections dealing with capital letters and the differences of use of them between English and

Swedish. Considering the number of mistakes that might not occur with a more thorough

presentation of the problem in school books, more emphasis placed on the use of capital

letters in Swedish school books for ESL learners could be advocated. That is, if the researcher

is only looking at reducing the number of mistakes, no matter their type. On the other hand,

the reason other mistakes are so infrequent in comparison might be that they have been taught

thoroughly and that the use of capital letters might be considered a relatively small problem as

compared to, for example, verb inflection or learning what nouns are uncountable in English.

It might just be that capital lettering is a luxury problem which may be an issue for strong

learners at a late stage of learning, but is hardly a problem everyone needs to deal with since it

does not hamper the understanding of a text. This notion is supported by the fact that sections

on capital letters were more common and more extensive in books for upper secondary school

than in those for lower secondary school.

Since the study was limited both in time and length, I chose primarily to focus on Swedish

learners of English which meant that writers of essays with other ethnic (or more precisely:

language) backgrounds were taken away. This naturally affected the result. A more diverse

study, including people with other mother tongues who live in Sweden, would also be both

28

interesting and important for future teachers in Sweden, but such a study would also require a

different theoretical framework and many more essays and much more time that was granted

for this study. There is, however, always the possibility of complementing the study later.

Such a study could, for example, include people of other ethnical (i.e. language) backgrounds

and other features such as gender, age or even time spent abroad in English speaking

countries. A researcher could also complement the didactic angle of the essay by studying

how the results may best be used when teaching.

It is important to remember that the essays selected for the study were produced by writers

who had been accepted to various universities which possibly meant they had better grades

than their schoolmates who were not accepted or did not apply. Moreover, they had studied

English at university level for more than a year. The results might have possibly differed if I

had looked at essays written by a random selection of people who had just left upper

secondary school rather than the ones that went to study at university level. As no such corpus

is known to me, however, the way the study was conducted seemed most efficient for the

purpose of this study. Even though the frequency of mistakes, or even the relation between

the mistakes displayed in percentages, might not be the same as in a study with a more

random sample of writers who had left upper secondary school, some indications of common

mistakes made by Swedish learners of English may be seen in the results.

The frequency of mistakes involving capital letters might have been affected by the choice

of material. Since the students did not get to choose the topics of the essays freely, but rather

were given a few topics to choose from, some occurrences of capital letters might be more

frequent in the essays chosen than in a random sample of language. One such example is that

many essays were about how to celebrate Christmas, thus naturally increasing the frequency

of the word Christmas opening the door to more mistakes, showing that the writer had not

acquired the rule that the names of all holidays start with a capital letter in English. It is also

possible that the language of the essays was influenced by the more informal language

expressed on the Internet and other forms of modern communication, which the writers may

have come into contact with via text messages, e-mails, chat programmes and the like.

One of the many benefits of working with a corpus is that the material remains unaffected

by the researcher. As most of the material was assembled more than ten years ago, I could not

have affected the writers to perform in another way than they did, something that could have

happened if I had asked people to write an essay for my study. Moreover, the writers probably

performed at the top of their knowledge since the writing of the essays gave them grades as

well and was not something they were asked to do for someone else’s project.

29

The form of the writing also contributed to making the material more representative of the

actual knowledge of the writers. Since all essays in the study were written without the use of a

monolingual or bilingual dictionary or grammar, the spontaneity of the results was ensured.

Similarly, no computers with spelling and grammar checkers were used. What the students

produced were essays representative of their knowledge, no more, no less.

As a final reflection, I would like to stress that the results of this paper should not be over-

interpreted. I have categorised some mistakes as resulting from the L1 influence, whereas

other researchers might not. Similarly, everyone might not agree with all my corrections of

the essays. What matters is what the results indicate. On a personal level, I have become extra

aware of the mistakes I make myself when writing and i would have to be very tired or

distracted to make a Capital Mistake again.

30

31

List of references5

Bergman, Lars, Ian Hinchliffe & Ingvar Sjöholm. 1992. Engelska. Göteborg:

Akademiförlaget.

Cambridge advanced learner’s dictionary. 2005. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Casselryd, Per-Ola, Astrid Jägfeldt & Kjell Ljungberg. 1998. Project X. Stockholm: Natur

och Kultur.

Cutler, Tony & Dennis Miller. 1994. Get it together. Malmö: Gleerups. Ellis, Rod. 1997. Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Glover, Mary, Richard Glover, Bo Hedberg & Per Malmberg. 1997, 2003. Wings. Stockholm:

Natur och Kultur.

Hedencrona, Eva, Karin Smed-Gerdin & Peter Watcyn-Jones. 2007. Action in

Progress. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

James, Carl. 1980. Contrastive Analysis. Harlow: Longman Group Limited.

James, Carl. 1998. Errors in Language Learning and Use – Exploring Error Analysis.

Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.

Ljung, Magnus & Sölve Ohlander. 1992. Gleerups Engelska Grammatik. Malmö: Gleerups.

Lund University. 2007. The Swedish Component of the International Corpus of Learner

English. Lund. http://www.englund.lu.se/corpus/corpus/swicle.html. Accessed 19 March

2008.

Odlin, Terence. 1989. Language Transfer – Cross-linguistic Influence in Language Learning.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skoog, Petra. 2006. Native Language Interference – a Study of Interference Patterns in

Swedish Students’ English Writing. Karlstad: Karlstads Universitet. Found at:

http://www.diva-portal.org/kau/abstract.xsql?dbid=418 Accessed 19 March 2008.

Tholin, Jörgen, Rigmor Eriksson & Moira Linnarud. 1996. A piece of cake. Stockholm:

Almqvist & Wiksell.

5 Note that the books presented in Section 4.3 are mentioned here as well, but not as isolated books but entire

book series.

Appendix A – Tables of mistakes Table 1 – All mistakes in the essays, excluding capital letter mistakes

Table 2 – All capital letter mistakes in the essays Overuse of capital

letters Weekdays, months, holidays

Nationals, languages, nationalities

First person singular

Religions, political parties and members

Words unaccounted for

Sum 18 17 16 2 1 7 % of total no. of capital letter mistakes

30 28

26 3 1.6 11

Spelling Choice of words and idioms

Verb forms/ tenses

Articles Prepositions Punctuation Nouns count/mass distinction and number

Order of constituents

Pronouns Words missing and question marks

Sum 98 55 39 20 16 15 6 5 2 7 Average no. per essay

1.96 1.1 0.78 0.4 0.32 0.3 0.12 0.1 0.04 0.14

% of total no. of mistakes

30 17 12 6 5 4.6 2 1.5 0.6 2

Appendix B – SWICLE essays used The following essays from the SWICLE were chosen for the essay and all examples in the thesis are taken from them. ICLE-SW-UG-001 ICLE-SW-UG-002 ICLE-SW-UG-004 ICLE-SW-UG-005 ICLE-SW-UG-006 ICLE-SW-UG-007 ICLE-SW-UG-008 ICLE-SW-UG-009 ICLE-SW-UG-010 ICLE-SW-UG-013 ICLE-SW-UG-014 ICLE-SW-UG-015 ICLE-SW-UG-017 ICLE-SW-UG-018 ICLE-SW-UG-019 ICLE-SW-UG-020 ICLE-SW-UG-021 ICLE-SW-UG-023 ICLE-SW-UG-025 ICLE-SW-UG-026 ICLE-SW-UG-027 ICLE-SW-UG-028 ICLE-SW-UG-030 ICLE-SW-UG-032 ICLE-SW-UG-033 ICLE-SW-UG-036 ICLE-SW-UG-037 ICLE-SW-UG-038 ICLE-SW-UG-039 ICLE-SW-UG-040 ICLE-SW-UG-043 ICLE-SW-UG-044 ICLE-SW-UG-047 ICLE-SW-UG-048 ICLE-SW-UG-049 ICLE-SW-UG-052 ICLE-SW-UG-053 ICLE-SW-UG-054 ICLE-SW-UG-055 ICLE-SW-UG-056 ICLE-SW-UG-059 ICLE-SW-UG-060 ICLE-SW-UG-061 ICLE-SW-UG-063 ICLE-SW-UG-065

ICLE-SW-UG-067 ICLE-SW-UG-068 ICLE-SW-UG-070 ICLE-SW-UG-071 ICLE-SW-UG-072