This project has further developed the SPLLOC (Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpora) research programme and has included new data investigating the acquisition of tense and aspect by English learners of Spanish.
Project overview
This project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council from 2008-2010 (Research grant no. RES-062-23-1075). Our goal was to add a new Spanish L2 corpus to the existing SPLLOC collection, including both oral production and interpretation data from three different groups of learners (beginners, intermediate and advanced), and to make this available to other researchers through the SPLLOC website . We ourselves have gone on to use this corpus to test the predictions made by two leading hypotheses on tense and aspect development: the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (which predicts that the use of tense and aspect is determined by the properties of the verb) and the Discourse Hypothesis, (which predicts that the use of tense and aspect is determined by the discursive context).
This research is contributing to answering current theoretical problems about second language learning such as how different grammatical components (ie semantics, morphology, syntax) are involved in the acquisition of tense and aspect. The project also assists in curriculum design and evaluation by providing better description and understanding of typical learner development in Spanish which can be utilised by policy makers, curriculum developers and teachers.
For more information visit the SPLLOC website.
Staff
