Application of Data Mining in Language Form-Noticing Research: An Experimental Study of Effects of Gender and Proficiency on Form-Noticing

The form-noticing language learners show in the language output and feedback is the key to improving the quality of output. While form-noticing has been increasingly researched by many language teachers, effects of proficiency and sex and its impact on subsequent learning in the context of EFL writing have not been fully investigated through data mining. This study examined EFL students´ English vocabulary errors and problems. By data mining, the results suggest that more proficient students have a consistent cognition for their own problems, while Less proficient students focused their problems and form-noticing mainly on verbs, nouns and adjectives (esp. males), but in fact, their errors lie in verbs and sentence structures, and the correction ratio and incorporation ratio for more proficient learners are generally higher than less proficient learners. Females showed higher solving, correction, and incorporation ratios respectively. Implications drawn from these findings are discussed.