A Correlation Analysis of English Particle Placement of Three East Asian EFL Learners Writings

This paper examines the English particle placements of EFL learners’ writings in three East Asian countries (Chinese, Japan, and Korea). Three parts of the TOEFL11 corpus were chosen, and all the sentences with particles were extracted. The ICE-GB was chosen as a native speakers’ English. Then, eleven linguistic factors were manually encoded. The collected data were analyzed with R. Correlation tests and a hierarchical clustering analysis was adopted. Through the analysis, the following two facts were observed: (i) each linguistic factor affected differently in four varieties of English and (ii) Japanese English was similar to native speakers’ counterparts whereas Korean and Chinese formed another group.