Development of grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatics in an additional language: insights from Spanish learner corpus research

ABSTRACT

The current article offers an overview of scholarship on additional-language (e.g., second-language, heritage-language) users of Spanish that has been carried out using learner corpora in the last decade. I focus the review of Spanish learner corpus research on investigations that have examined grammar (e.g., fluency, grammatical gender), vocabulary (e.g., lexical diversity), and pragmatics (e.g., discourse markers), and I highlight the contributions that this body of work has made to the understanding of the use and development of additional-language Spanish. I also discuss the pedagogical applications that this line of inquiry may have. I conclude by identifying specific avenues for future work pertaining to research on additional-language learning and the development of new corpora.

RESUMEN

Este artículo ofrece una descripción general de las investigaciones en la última década sobre hablantes de español como lengua adicional (p. ej., como segunda lengua o lengua de herencia) que se han llevado a cabo utilizando corpus de aprendices. Más concretamente, se pone el foco de atención en la revisión de la investigación de corpus de aprendices de español que examina la gramática (p. ej., la fluidez, el género gramatical), el vocabulario (p. ej., la diversidad léxica) y la pragmática (p. ej., los marcadores discursivos), destacando estas contribuciones al uso y desarrollo del español como lengua adicional. También se abordan las implicaciones pedagógicas más notables. El artículo concluye con la identificación de vías específicas para el trabajo futuro relacionado con la investigación sobre el aprendizaje de idiomas adicionales y el desarrollo de nuevos corpus.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocabulary
• grammar
• pragmatics
• learners
• Spanish
• corpora

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Vocabulario
• gramática
• pragmática
• aprendices
• español
• corpus

Notes

1 I use this term to refer to second-language and heritage-language learning.

2 See Miaschi et al. (2020) for an example of a corpus-based study that uses Natural Language Processing tools to examine writing in additional-language Spanish.

3 I also limit the present article to empirical studies that have analyzed corpus data only. Investigations, however, that examine both corpus and either experimental data or other types of non-publicly available data exist (e.g., Tracy-Ventura and Myles 2015; Tracy-Ventura 2017; Sampedro Mella 2021). Additionally, there are numerous studies that have analyzed Spanish alongside other target languages (e.g., Stengers et al. 2011; Erman et al. 2015; Huensch and Tracy-Ventura 2017a; Huensch et al. 2019; Edmonds and Gudmestad 2021; McManus, Mitchell and Tracy-Ventura 2021; Tracy-Ventura, Huensch, and Mitchell 2021), but the current article is limited to those that focus on Spanish only.

4 Achievements and accomplishments are telic, whereas activities and states are unbounded.

5 See Gudmestad, Edmonds, and Metzger (2019) and Gudmestad (2020) for other investigations on grammatical gender marking in Spanish that consist of analyses of LANGSNAP data.

6 This corpus also contains data on learners of French and native speakers of French and Spanish.

7 The native-speaker or monolingual bias “results from the assumption that monolingualism is the default for human communication and from valuing nativeness as a superior form of language competence and the most legitimate relationship between a language and its users” (Ortega 2014, 32).

8 For other corpus-based investigations on subject expression in Spanish, see Gudmestad and Edmonds (forthcoming) and Lozano (2016).

9 See Fernández-Mira et al. (2021) for another corpus-based study on lexical diversity in second-language Spanish.