Learning to construct English (L2) sentences in a bilingual corpus-based system

Few students who learn English as a Foreign Language (EFL) could benefit from bilingual corpus-based systems if instruction on metalinguistic awareness is not provided. This study reports on a bilingual corpus-based system with error-detection and grading mechanisms to arouse students' metalinguistic awareness in constructing English (L2) sentences from Chinese (L1) texts. Sixty-three college students were grouped into 35 more proficient (MP) and 28 less proficient (LP) students to perform the following procedure: (1) read each sentence from L1 texts to form L2 sentences; (2) receive the graded results as feedback and reconstruct the fragmented English sentences if necessary; (3) review all of the translated sentences (L2) in the history record, then (4) make further revisions to the sentences in (3) as appropriate. The results show that both the MP and the LP students made progress with the support of error-detection and grading mechanisms. Particularly, the LP students made more progress than the MP students did by demonstrating a higher frequency of using these two mechanisms to monitor the syntactic similarities and differences between L1 and L2, repair the syntactic errors, and thus conceptualize the correctness of L2 sentences. The students' perceptions toward sentence construction tasks were elaborated in this study.