Article published in:
Spanish Learner Corpus Research: Current trends and future perspectives
Edited by Margarita Alonso-Ramos
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 78] 2016
► pp. 169–196

Chapter 7
Spanish Corpus Proficiency Level Training Website and Corpus

An open-source, online resource for corpus linguistics studies

| The University of Texas at Austin
| The University of Texas at Austin

Based on previous research on second language learner oral proficiency (e.g. Omaggio Hadley 2001) and related teacher training (e.g. Liskin-Gasparro 2003), the Spanish Corpus Proficiency Level Training website offers an open, online training resource on Spanish learner proficiency levels for future and current Spanish teachers. It provides 327 videotaped segments of 38 learners, including 17 U.S. Spanish heritage learners, of various Spanish proficiency levels who answer the same set of interview questions. The site and the corpus of videotapes offer implications for teachers to help guide their students towards proficiency goals.

Given the richness of the video bank, it has shown itself to be useful to goals of corpus linguistics. To illustrate, we examine pronominal subject expression in oral speech by the Spanish heritage language learners of three levels of linguistic proficiency in the corpus. We analyze the learners’ sensitivity to conditioning variables that have been found to affect pronominal expression in Spanish by Spanish heritage speakers in the U.S. The chapter concludes with feedback from site users and suggestions for other uses of the corpus.

Keywords: online training website, oral proficiency, proficiency levels, Spanish as a second language, corpus linguistics, subject pronouns
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.L2 learner corpora and applications for second language assessment
  • 3.The Spanish for Proficiency Training (SPT) website and videotaped corpus
  • 4.Utility of the SPT corpus
  • 5.Methodology of data collection and classification
    • 5.1Brief summary of results from our study
    • 5.2Implications of our study
  • 6.Conclusions: Second language acquisition and heritage language research using the SPT corpus
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 December 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.78.07koi
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