Margarita Alonso-Ramos - Spanish Learner Corpus Research: Current trends and future perspectives

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Spanish Learner Corpus Research

Current trends and future perspectives

Margarita Alonso-Ramos Universidade da Corua

doi: 10.1075/scl.78

ISBN: 978 90 272 6624 8 (ebook)

2016 John Benjamins B.V.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

John Benjamins Publishing Company https://benjamins.com

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam/Philadelphia

Table of contents

Spanish learner corpus research: Achievements and challenges

Margarita Alonso-Ramos

What is missing in learner corpus design?

Yukio Tono

Learner Spanish on computer: The CAES Corpus de Aprendices de Espaol project

Guillermo Rojo and Ignacio Palacios

PoS-tagging a Spanish oral learner corpus: Criteria, procedure, and a sample analysis

Leonardo Campillos Llanos

The LANGSNAP longitudinal learner corpus: Design and use

Nicole Tracy-Ventura, Rosamond Mitchell and Kevin McManus

The Aprescrilov corpus, or broadening the horizon of Spanish language learning in Flanders

Kris Buysse, Lydia Fernndez Pereda and Katrien Verbeckken

Spanish Corpus Proficiency Level Training Website and Corpus: An open-source, online resource for corpus linguistics studies

Dale Koike and Jennifer Witte

Factors that can have an impact on the processes of perceiving Spanish/L2

Ana Blanco Canales

Pragmatic principles in anaphora resolution at the syntax-discourse interface: Advanced English learners of Spanish in the CEDEL2 corpus

Cristbal Lozano

Discourse markers in CEDEL2 and SPLLOC corpora of learner Spanish: Analysis of some lexical-pragmatic failures

Nancy Vzquez Veiga

A corpus study of Spanish as a foreign language learners collocation production

Orsolya Vinzce, Marcos Garca-Salido, Ana Orol and Margarita Alonso-Ramos

Section 1 Introduction

Chapter 1 Spanish learner corpus research Achievements and challenges Margarita Alonso-Ramos
Universidade da Corua

This chapter presents a state-of-the-art overview of Spanish learner corpus research (SLCR). It starts by emphasizing the uniqueness of a monograph focusing on research dealing with learners of a language other than English. The next section is concerned with the status of Spanish as a foreign language in the world, and as a pluricentric language made up of a set of American and Spanish varieties. After that, the main features of learner corpus design and analysis in SLCR are reviewed. Besides of providing an overview of the main Spanish learner corpora, this chapter directs attention towards some of the challenges that this field of research will have to face. The last section briefly reviews the contributions to this volume.

Keywords

• Spanish learner corpora
• Spanish as a foreign language
• pluricentric Spanish
• Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis
• Computer-aided Error Analysis
• learning resources

Introduction

If it is usual to mention that learner corpus research (LCR) is a young field, as most researchers place its beginnings in the late 1980s ().

Over the last few years, publications of learner corpus research on languages other than English have proliferated. Without intending to be exhaustive, several projects should be mentioned: the Falko corpus (

The status of Spanish as a Foreign Language

According to ) reports more than 21 million Spanish learners, a figure produced by adding together the number of students of Spanish in 106 countries where Spanish is not an official language. Although the data are approximate, the Instituto Cervantes estimates that the actual demand for Spanish is at least 25% higher than the figure mentioned. The countries with the largest number of students of Spanish are the United States and Brazil, with more than 7 million and 6 million learners, respectively, whilst the number of registrations in the Instituto Cervantes centers multiplied by 13 between 1993 and 2014. Another indication of the status of Spanish as a foreign language is the increasing number of students taking the Diploma de Espaol como Lengua Extranjera (DELE, Diploma of Spanish as a Foreign Language) , an official multi-level qualification awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education that has attracted around 60 thousand candidates in recent years.

Spanish is spoken as a first language in 21 countries in several geographic varieties. This variability can pose the problem of which variety of Spanish should be chosen as the target language (see

Learner corpus design and analysis in SLCR: Features and problems

Spanish learner corpora have the same biases as English learner corpora. Following the major categories proposed by concerning the design of learner corpora, the main features of Spanish learner corpora can be summarized in the following way:

1. language-related criteria:
   • mode: many more written than spoken or multimodal corpora
   • genre: letters and essays are the most common
   • style: narration, argumentation
   • topic: generally related to the learners personal knowledge, such as leisure, family, work. There is no Spanish academic learner corpus such as CALE () as of yet
2. task-related criteria:
   • data collection: many more cross-sectional than longitudinal corpora
   • data elicitation: most are written compositions based on a topic proposed by the teacher/researcher
   • use of references: most of the time this is not indicated
   • time limitations: most of the time none. An exception is LANGSNAP, where learners were assigned 15 minutes for the completion of the writing task.
3. learner-related criteria:
   • age: mostly young adults
   • motivation and attitude: voluntary participation, a positive attitude towards Spanish
   • learning context: Spanish as a Foreign Language in a school/university context
   • L1 background: English is the most common L1 of Spanish learner corpora
   • L2 proficiency: Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe 2011) levels are usually indicated, but the proficiency level is not always well specified.

Language proficiency, which is not always optimally identified in English LCR, is also an issue in SLCR ( below).

In order to analyze the data, two methods are usually employed in SLCR, as they are in general LCR: the method that has become known as Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA, .

The CEA approach is not very frequently used in SLCR (see, however, Campillos 2014 and : 135 and 141) state, corpus data must be interpreted in order to be useful: the correct version against which a learner utterance is evaluated is simply a necessary methodological step in identifying an error. We also chose to include the target hypothesis in our annotation of collocations, even though at times it was not totally clear (for example, the erroneous collocation in the context lograr un gol could be interpreted as meter un gol score a goal (in sport) or as lograr un objetivo achieve an aim).

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