Linguistic development in L2 Spanish: creation and analysis of a learner corpus

This project had two aims: to establish a small scale, high quality database of spoken learner Spanish, and to undertake a short programme of substantive research into L2 (second language)Spanish. The data was collected from classroom learners of Spanish (with English as their first language), from beginners to advanced level, using specially designed elicitation tasks. For comparison purposes, native speakers were also recorded undertaking the same tasks. The resulting database contains digital soundfiles of learner speech, accompanied by transcripts in CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) format which are tagged for parts of speech. The material will be made freely available for use among the Spanish second language acquisition research community, through a specially created website. The substantive research programme investigates the acquisition of central morphosyntactic properties of Spanish, such as word order, clitic pronouns, verbal morphology and wh-questions, providing a description and analysis of developmental sequences of L2 Spanish from an interface perspective. Phenomena such as the role of rote-learned formulas in instructed L2 Spanish were also studied. Research such as this enables us to better understand the processes involved in learning a second language in a classroom setting, and thus supports curriculum design for instructed L2 programmes.