Chapter 7
Spanish Corpus Proficiency Level Training Website and Corpus
An open-source, online resource for corpus linguistics studies
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.
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
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5.Methodology of data collection and classification
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5.1Brief summary of results from our study
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5.2Implications of our study
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6.Conclusions: Second language acquisition and heritage language research using the SPT corpus
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Notes
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References
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Appendix
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Cited by
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Gudmestad, Aarnes
2022.
Development of grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatics in an additional language: insights from Spanish learner corpus research.
Journal of Spanish Language Teaching 9:2
► pp. 161 ff.

Sánchez-Gutiérrez, Claudia, Barbara De Cock & Nicole Tracy-Ventura
2022.
Spanish corpora and their pedagogical uses: challenges and opportunities.
Journal of Spanish Language Teaching 9:2
► pp. 105 ff.

Yamada, Aaron, Sam Davidson, Paloma Fernández-Mira, Agustina Carando, Kenji Sagae & Claudia Sánchez-Gutiérrez
2020.
COWS-L2H: A corpus of Spanish learner writing.
Research in Corpus Linguistics 8
► pp. 17 ff.

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