Lexicon and teaching: an analysis of the use of less frequent prepositions in a Spanish learners corpus

This article aims at presenting a quantitative research and the analysis of the use of prepositions that are less frequent (underused) in a corpus of learners of Spanish as a foreign language. We have observed the use of contra, hacia, enfrente de, excepto and tras through Corpus Linguistics by contrasting this lexical set and a supplementary corpus, composed by normative and descriptive Spanish grammar and by an online reference corpus of Spanish (CREA). Therefore, we present analyses made on a corpus constituted by 276 writings (85.729 words), gathered from two groups of freshman Language/Letras students, from 2011 to 2013. The data were collected with the aid of the WordSmith Tools (version 6) software and its tools, WordList and Concord enabled us to extract the frequency list of the prepositions in the corpus of study, as well as to observe and analyse their respective uses based on the lines of concordance