Writing English sentences more effectively by avoiding Arabian students' typical mistakes
[Thesis]
Alaa Alsharif
McRoy, Susan
The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
2016
68
Committee members: Mali, Amol; Munson, Ethan
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-339-79203-3
M.S.
Computer Science
The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
2016
In Arabic speaking countries like Saudi Arabia, English is considered as the most important second language to be taught and used. Unfortunately, a sizeable percentage of students there appear to still have significant difficulty learning English, possibly due to the difficulty in finding sufficiently qualified teachers. This type of problem is self-perpetuating since the taught students might become weak teachers in the future also. This thesis aims to address the problem of helping Arabic students to improve their writing in English and to help them learn so that they will make fewer mistakes in the future and possibly become better teachers themselves. It focuses on creating methods to find the most typical mistakes made by those Arabian students in their writing, mistakes which were determined by the author from both self-observation and a review of related research findings (The author also saw these mistakes in the sentences used by subjects who tried pilot versions of the software). The result of this work is usable software that is able to detect, correct, and provide grammatical rules related to the most common mistakes found in the written sentences of the target Arabian students, when the sentences are in the present tense. These types are errors related to the following rules: (1) letters capitalization rules, (2) adj-noun ordering in the sentence, (3) proper use of the verb to be, (4) punctuation placement rules, (5) the use of the articles "a" and "an" within a sentence, and (6) rules for the possessive case.