This study investigates the developmental rate of estar production by Chinese-speaking learners in planned written production. The forms of Spanish copula verbs have no equivalent forms in Chinese in pre-adjectival position (i.e. no copula verb exists between a referent and an adjective in Chinese). This contrast between languages provides a number of opportunities for novel insights into copula acquisition, including universality and developmental dynamics. Thus, this research examines, particularly, factors that are associated with estar use in a pre-adjectival position. Unlike early copula acquisition studies which examined accuracy rates, this research examines semantic, pragmatic, and lexical characteristics of copula use (Geeslin, 2000(Geeslin, , 2003 within the context of free written essays. Beginner and intermediate level Chinese-speaking learners of Spanish seem to acquire copula choice through a lexical and semantic approach. As learner vocabulary expands, pragmatic and semantic features (prior experience and animate-change) become most salient in relation to higher rates of use of estar in a free writing task. While the research methods of this study differ from those of Geeslin (2000Geeslin ( , 2003, some findings are comparable. Results indicate that the methods used here can be used to glean further novel insights from the SLA process of Chinese-speaking learners.* We would like to thank the participants in the Corpus of Taiwanese Learners of Spanish (CATE) 2005 for their input, the National Science Council in Taiwan for funding the construction of CATE, and, particularly, the anonymous reviewers and the volume editors for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are also indebted to Lihua Chen of the University of Toledo, Department of Mathematics, for her valuable discussion, explanation, and clarification of theoretical issues regarding our choice of statistical analysis.

Este trabajo tiene como fin investigar el desarrollo de los tiempos pasados en la interlengua de los aprendices taiwaneses que aprenden español como segunda lengua extranjera. El análisis se basa en la Hipótesis de Aspecto Léxico que se centra en la importancia del aspecto léxico de los verbos. Llegamos a las siguientes conclusiones:(1) los aprendices taiwaneses de español cuya lengua materna es chino-mandarín manejan el pretérito mejor que el imperfecto en la producción escrita de los niveles

Español, CATE: (http://140.116.245.228/ ) -is unique for being the first and largest annotated Taiwanese learners' corpus of Spanish with multi-query functions in the on-line interface. This corpus has collaborated with other L3 learners' corpora under the integrated project entitled "Multilingual Corpora" executed by the FLLD (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures) and technically supported by the WMMKS ( Web Mining and Multilingual Knowledge S ystem) Laboratory of CSIE (Computer Science and Information Engineering) of the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan.There are four steps in the procedure of corpus creation: data collecting, entry, annotation and programming. The written texts for our corpus have been collected since 2005, contributed by Taiwanese learners of different levels (categorized according to learning hours of Spanish) 2 from 15 universities 3 in Taiwan who take Spanish as their second foreign language and English as their first. During the first four years, 1,913 compositions (337,122 words) have been collected. Corresponding to these written texts, two types of general information have been compiled and processed in the database: (1) the authors' personal information (sex, department, university, learning hours of Spanish, special background related to Spanish learning including being immigrants, exchange students, transfers and previous learning experience) and (2) its attribution (length, task type, textual type, and theme). For the purpose of public use, a web-oriented system has been designed, and the authors of all compositions have signed a consent form agreeing that their written production can be used for academic research.In order to facilitate more advanced research of error and contrastive analysis, learners' errors have been correction-annotated. So far, the mistakes in the compiled texts in the sub-corpus CATE [2005][2006] (1,058 compositions, 181,322 words) made by the participants have been manually corrected by native speakers of Spanish and saved in an XML format by applying the Corpus Tool of UAM (Universitad Autónoma de Madrid) developed by Mick Brought to you by | Simon Fraser University Authenticated Download Date | 6/2/15 12:11 AM

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The topic of collocation has drawn attention for the past three decades in the lexical area of theoretical and applied linguistics. Our research team developed and evaluated a corpus-based assisted tool for collocation learning in Spanish. Based on the two constructed corpora (CEATE and CPEIC) and a Spanish collocation extraction tool (HCE), this computer-assisted learning tool, SpColEDRS, is easy to use to detect errors and also suggests revisions for Spanish collocations. Based on the evaluation, the research results indicated that the tool developed in this research can assist learners effectively, especially in the case of beginners. In addition, the results of the satisfaction survey provided positive confirmation of the effectiveness of this tool in assisting the learning of Spanish collocations. Finally, this study shed light on pedagogical applications of the constructed corpora and the learning of Spanish collocation with a corpus-based approach in a multilingual acquisition setting.