Do Errors Matter? The effects of actual and perceived L2 English errors in writing on native and non-native English speakers’ evaluations of the text, the writer and the persuasiveness of the text

Abstract

Building on studies of L1 error effects in writing, the present study aimed to gain further insight into thecommunicative consequences of actual and perceived L2 errors in writing by investigating their effects beyond theevaluation of text quality. No studies of L2 writing would appear to have investigated the impact of errors onperception of the author and communicative outcomes. We investigated the effect of L2 English errors in persuasivewriting on native and non-native English speakers’ evaluation of the text, of the author, and of the persuasiveness ofthe text. Selected, authentic, errors from a corpus of petitions written in English by Dutch native speakers wereincluded in a stimulus text. Two versions of the text were presented to (non-teacher) participants in a 2 (errors vs. noerrors) by 2 (native vs. non-native judges) between-subject experimental design. It was found that, while actual errorhad no effect on the participants’ evaluation of the text, the author, or the persuasiveness of the text, perceived error(that is, if participants thought the text contained errors) had a significant negative effect on text attractiveness andthe author’s trustworthiness, friendliness and competence. Thus, the findings would suggest that perceived errorplays an important role in how non-teacher judges evaluate a text and its author, and, more generally, that suchjudges would seem to use their own standards of correctness against which to judge writing and the writer, regardlessof whether the judges are native or non-native speakers.