Chapter published in:
Learner Corpora and Language Teaching
Edited by Sandra Götz and Joybrato Mukherjee
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 92] 2019
► pp. 101–128

Researching learner language through POS keyword and syntactic complexity analyses

| University of Cambridge
| Universidad de Jaén

In this paper, we explore the affordances of two different research methods that may be instrumental in analysing learner language complexity: standard corpus linguistics methodology and automatic syntactic complexity analysers. Our results suggest that POS keyword analysis and automatic syntactic analysis are both effective for the identification of linguistic features at different levels of development in instructed SLA. In particular, countable nouns, prepositional phrases, verbs and general adverbs are criterial features that define the transition from lower to higher secondary school language learning in the Spanish component of the ICCI corpus. We suggest that the analysis of complexity in noun phrases is of great interest for researchers and teachers in terms of identifying development milestones in language acquisition.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research methodology
    • 2.1Data
    • 2.2Research methods
  • 3.Contrasting learner corpora (1): POS keyword analysis
    • 3.1Grades 7 and 8
    • 3.2Grades 11 and 12
    • 3.3Grades 7 and 8 vs Grades 11 and 12
  • 4.Contrasting learner corpora (2): Automatic syntactic complexity analysis
    • 4.1Grades 7, 8, 11 and 12: Complexity in the noun phrase
    • 4.2Grades 7, 8, 11 and 12: Syntactic sophistication
      • 4.2.1Traditional measures of syntactic complexity
      • 4.2.2Measures of syntactic sophistication
    • 4.3Grades 7 and 8 vs Grades 11 and 12: Complexity in the noun phrase and syntactic sophistication measures
  • 5.Discussion and pedagogical implications
    • 5.1RQ (1) Do different groups of learners present distinct linguistic features?: Can these features be identified by means of automatic analysis of language?
    • 5.2RQ (2) Do different methods to carry out automatic analysis of language present a similar picture of complexity and language development?: How do the research methods in this paper complement each other? How does this complementarity inform language teaching?
  • 6.Conclusion and some limitations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 06 May 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.92.06per
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