The Aprescrilov corpus, or broadening the horizon of Spanish language learning in Flanders: the case of learning to write descriptive texts

Today linguistics is technologically driven. This is why learner corpora (LC) are gaining interest, particularly with regard to their potential to facilitate research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). However, there appears to be a lack of progress in establishing strong, bidirectional links between those fields, due to (i) a shortage of longitudinal studies that would allow scholars to establish causality in interpreting the results of corpus data, let alone test the efficiency of pedagogical adjustments and (ii) the fact that it is more typical of LC analysis to draw on descriptions of learner language rather than to explain them (Hasko 2013: 4-5). In this talk we aim to contribute to narrow the gap between LC and FLT by showing how we use the Aprescrilov corpus in order to perform longitudinal studies, leading to useful insights in foreign language acquisition, to the analysis of decisive factors in making the errors and avoiding them, and, eventually, based on impact studies, to the improvement of language teaching and learning, particularly of Spanish as a FL.status: publishe