Graduate and Professional Student Research Conference
2019

Presenters: Brody Dingel and Kristin Terrill

Abstract: Although corpus-informed materials for English teaching have gained in popularity over the past three decades, instructional resources for languages other than English have lagged in adopting corpus-based findings. The present study adapts the method demonstrated in Conrad (1999), for using corpus methods to go beyond frequency and collocation, to an analysis of Spanish linking adverbials in the academic writing and conversation registers. The goal of this research is to generate findings that will lead to improved materials development for Spanish instruction, considering that linking adverbials have been identified by other researchers as important features for Spanish learners. The results of this study indicate that linking adverbials reflect many similar patterns of use as English linking adverbials, especially in terms of the relative frequency of semantic categories and clausal placement.The preliminary findings of this study suggest that corpus analysis is a useful approach for exploring linking adverbials in Spanish, as it has shown to be in English.

Corpus studies can contribute meaningfully to the field of SLA by allowing researchers to empirically study large amounts of language in both written and spoken modes. In this way, it is possible to understand more about how linguistic input can impact acquisition, especially the acquisition of specific varieties and registers. This study illustrates a method of selecting a particular feature that distinguishes the academic written register from that of spoken conversation. Implications for SLA include the question of how these features are acquired by language learners, especially those learning Spanish for a specific purpose. As a replication study, the present paper includes some comparative analysis of linking adverbial characteristics between English (as reported in Conrad, 1999) and Spanish, thus providing some interesting implications for a study on L1 transfer for English-speaking Spanish learners.