Evaluation of Corpus Assisted Spanish Learning

Evaluation of Corpus-Assisted Spanish Learning Hui-Chuan Lu FLLD, NCKU / No. 1 University Road 701 Tainan, Taiwan Yu-Hsin Chu FLLD, NCKU / No. 1 University Road 701 Tainan, Taiwan huichuanlu1@gmail.com katy0806@gmail.com Abstract In the development of corpus linguistics, the creation of corpora has had a critical role in corpus-based studies. The majority of created corpora have been associated with English and native languages, while other languages and types of corpora have received relatively less attention. Because an increasing number of corpora have been constructed, and each corpus is constructed for a definite purpose, this study identifies the functions of corpora and combines the values of various types of corpora for auto-learning based on the existing corpora. Specifically, the following three corpora are adopted: (a) the Corpus of Spanish; (b) the Corpus of Taiwanese Learners of Spanish; and (c) the Parallel Corpus of Spanish, English, and Chinese. These corpora represent a type of native, learner, and parallel language, respectively. We apply these corpora as auxiliary resources to identify the advantages of applying various types of corpora in language learning from a learner’s perspective. In the environment of auto-learning, 28 participants completed frequency questions related to semantic and lexical aspects. After analyzing the questionnaire data, we obtained the following findings: (a) the native corpus requires a more advanced level of Spanish proficiency to manage ampler and deeper context; (b) the learners’ corpus facilitates the distinction between error and correction during the learning process; (c) the parallel corpus assists learners in connecting form and meaning; (d) learning is more efficient if the learner can capitalizes on specific functions provided by various corpora in the application order of parallel, learner and native corpora. 1 Introduction The trend of using corpus has expanded into all sub-areas of linguistics, including applied fields such as foreign language teaching and learning. According to Lee (2010), almost 360 corpora have been constructed for various purposes in 57 languages. Sixty-three percent of these corpora have been analyzed in previous research on language analysis and English teaching. In the past decade, the majority of corpus users have been researchers and teachers. Therefore, we are interested in extending the usage of corpus to foreign language learners, and studying how the perspective of corpus application can benefit these learners. Moreover, instead of English, we have selected Spanish as the target language of this research because the popularity of second foreign language acquisition is increasing in Taiwan, and multilingualism has become a novel research topic in applied linguistics. Among the related literature, the application of existing corpora in teaching or learning has focused primarily on native corpus. Moreover, although there have been several studies on parallel corpus, very few have examined learners’ corpus. The reason that less attention has been drawn to the evaluation of effectiveness might be attributable to the lack of access to parallel and learners’ corpora. Moreover, to our knowledge, no study has compared the various types of corpora. The discussed reasons have motivated us to conduct this research. This study …

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