Elementary Spanish

Spanish Fairy Tales: Mini Corpus

For my mini corpus, I chose to use fairy tales in Spanish for elementary students. I chose the following titles, that all originate from a Spanish speaking region. I found the website, Mundo Primaria, had many simple stories for young learners that were not simply English stories that had been translated. El mono y el tiburón is an adapted story from Colombia. El sapo y el ratón is adapted from Spain. Le leyenda de la araña is adapted from ancient Quechua. I found two other Spanish stories on different websites: La dama del lago and El príncipe Tomasito y San José.

I wanted to use texts that young learners would be able to engage with, so I chose fairy tales because they are so common and carry so much cultural richness as well. I was hoping to find a lot of similarities in the language and structure of these stories that would help to guide instruction in a fairy tale unit. What I found was a bit different than I expected. Two of the texts had more common language than the others, and there were hardly any phrases shared between texts. The phrases that were identified were not necessarily phrases you would need to teach, but rather just two words found next to each other in two texts (en su, no lo). I am wondering if part of that is due to the language used in the tools. Here are some interesting vocab words that show up in at least 3 of the texts that I think would be worth pre-teaching: había, rey, quedó, vez, volvió. It seems like most verbs are in the past tense, which is important to note before teaching! I noticed that Voyant did not pick up on some short phrases like “una vez” as in “había una vez” or “érase una vez.”

Here are some more specific findings. This small corpus had a total word count of 5,706 words, 1,728 unique words. The top 5 most frequent words: a, no, le, te, me. The top 5 content words: reina, rey, sapo, pastor, ratón. The vocabulary density was highest in Le leyenda de la araña and lowest in La dama del lago. When I search the Corpus del Español, one tool that is not the same as the COCA is the chart tool. I was disappointed to discover that they do not calculate the frequency of words and phrases in spoken and formal or informal written form. I think this would have been useful when determining how to teach certain phrases and words.

I think these corpus tools can be very useful in planning and driving instruction. You could also use these tools in the classroom and have students run texts to learn from the tools! Below you will find links to each of the 5 texts I used in my mini corpus. From those websites, you can find more short stories in Spanish to use in your classroom!