Article published in:
Spanish Learner Corpus Research: Current trends and future perspectives
Edited by Margarita Alonso-Ramos
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 78] 2016
► pp. 117–142

Chapter 5
The LANGSNAP longitudinal learner corpus

Design and use

| University of South Florida
| University of Southampton
| The Pennsylvania State University

This chapter describes a new longitudinal corpus of L2 Spanish, which includes spoken and written data from the same learners, and was gathered in a residence/study abroad setting. The corpus was created as part of the Languages and Social Networks Abroad Project (LANGSNAP) which traced the learning of both Spanish and French during an academic year’s residence/study abroad by British Anglophone university students majoring in languages. Parallel longitudinal learner corpora totalling 300,000+ words were collected in each language. In this chapter we first describe the main features of the L2 Spanish corpus, and then illustrate how we have been using the corpus to investigate questions about language development, taking as an example the longitudinal development of lexical diversity (Jarvis 2013).

Keywords: learner corpus research, Spanish as a second language, longitudinal, study abroad, lexical diversity
Article outline
  • 1.Learner corpora and the longitudinal study of second language acquisition
  • 2.Overview of the LANGSNAP project and corpus creation
    • 2.1Design of LANGSNAP tasks
    • 2.2Format of LANGSNAP corpus
    • 2.3CLAN commands and data coding
  • 3.Measuring lexical development in the LANGSNAP corpus of L2 Spanish
    • 3.1Research questions
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 December 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.78.05tra
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