Browsing by Subject "UAM Corpus Tool"

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of proficiency level on the acquisition order of certain grammatical morphemes for L1 Spanish learners of L2 English. Additionally, the developmental patterns of individual morphemes will be studied with the help of a tagging method called Interlanguage Annotation. The study of acquisition order within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has been a topic of interest since the so-called Morpheme Order Studies of the 1970s. The key findings from the studies have suggested that accuracy scores of the morphemes reflect a somewhat fixed order of morpheme acquisition for L2 English learners irrespective of L1 background, age, or learning environment. Recent methodological improvements in the field have been aided by adapting research methods from Learner Corpus Research, which involves the analysis of language through the use of corpora. The design for the current study comes from a reference study (Lozano and Díaz-Negrillo 2019) which proposed two improvements to methods used in acquisition order research. Firstly, the L2 learners in the study were separated according to their L2 proficiency, a practice that has been overlooked in previous studies. Secondly, they proposed a fine-grained annotation method called Interlanguage Annotation, which allows for a more comprehensive analysis of the learner language samples. The current study employs the same design principles and is a replication of the reference study with a different dataset. The data is in the form of written learner language samples from 18–20-year-old L1 Spanish university students, who were given a task to summarize the events of a short clip from a silent film. The language samples have been obtained from COREFL, a learner corpus of L2 English. Each sample has been annotated separately for all morphemes, and the accuracy scores for the morphemes have been calculated similarly to the reference study. The results of the study preliminarily suggest that, unlike the reference study, L2 proficiency level does not have a considerable effect on the acquisition order of morphemes. Additionally, the use of Interlanguage Annotation helped to uncover some developmental patterns within individual morphemes, for example that omission errors were the most common error subtype in 3rd person singular -s.