The importance of task variability in the design of learner corpora for SLA research

Abstract

This cross-sectional study investigates task variability focusing on the use of Spanish past tense morphology in a spoken learner corpus. Sixty L2 learners of Spanish (English L1) from three different proficiency levels (20 per group) and fifteen native speakers completed three communicative tasks (a guided interview, a picture-based narrative, and a historical figures description) and an experimental task, all designed to investigate the acquisition of tense and aspect in L2 Spanish. Data were transcribed in CHAT, and analysed and coded using a specially created interactive coding program that works in combination with the CLAN program (MacWhinney 2000). Results demonstrate significant differences in the emergence and accurate use of past tense morphology across tasks. An additional analysis showed that the less controlled tasks encouraged few instances of more advanced features, suggesting that not all task types are equally successful at eliciting the range of tense-aspect morphological contrasts theoretically relevant for SLA research on tense and aspect.

Spanish Imperfect revisited: Exploring L1 influence in the reassembly of imperfective features onto new L2 forms

“…10. In another study, Tracy-Ventura and Myles (2015) have shown evidence of significant differences in the L2 proficiency of these three groups using a measure of lexical diversity known as D (Malvern and Richards, 2002), which is known to positively correlate with general language proficiency. 11.…”

A ‘mixed methods’ approach for investigating aspect in a second language

“…Smallscale learner corpora of this type can be a bridge between frequency-based, descriptive approaches and formal, hypothesis-driven approaches to SLA. In addition, small-scale and semi-spontaneous learner corpora have some of the advantages of large-scale corpora including the facilitation of data sharing among users, the easiness of data manipulation, and the automatization of the data analysis process (Myles, 2005;Tracy-Ventura & Myles, 2015). In contrast to largescale corpora, smaller learner corpora based on data collected to test a particular hypothesis require a certain manipulation of the data collection method.…”

The English Grammar Profile of learner competence

“…task, education history) variables. Gablasova et al (2017) note that there has been a recent gradual shift towards consideration of speaker-external related variables (Ädel, 2008, Gablasova et al 2015, Tracy-Ventura & Myles 2015 but there is a dearth of corpus-based studies on speaker-internal variables, such as L2 proficiency, despite its use as a control and outcome variable in SLA studies not using corpora. Despite its significance, standards for establishing and reporting learner proficiency in L2 corpora lack uniformity, making comparability of results difficult.…”