Understanding learners´ use of adverbs in spoken discourse: QUAN and QUAL insights from the LINDSEI corpus.
Pascual Pérez-Paredes, University of Cambridge
Queen Mary University, London. Applied Linguistics Research and Practice – guest speaker series.
Thu 16 November 2017, 16:30 – 17:30 GMT
Abstract
The use of adverbs in spoken discourse has received very little attention in learner language and SLA research (De Haan, 1999; Osborne, 2008; Pérez-Paredes, 2010a; Philip, 2008). In particular, SLA researchers have preferred to examine other structures such as t-units, clauses, sentence length, to name but a few, and have largely neglected the potential role of phrasal constructions and, especially, adverb phrases. However, some corpus research (Pérez-Paredes and Sánchez-Tornel, 2014; Pérez-Paredes and Diez-Bedmar, forthcoming) has shown that the use of adverbs is one of the few criterial features that define language development in instructed SLA. This paper discusses the use of really, probably and obviously in spoken language across different tasks. I´ll discuss the attested uses of these adverbs in four learner and native speaker corpora: the Chinese, German and Spanish LINDSEI (Brand and Kämmerer, 2006) components (n=50 each) and the extended LOCNEC corpus (n=78) (Aguado-Jiménez et al, 2012). These adverbs present different opportunities to examine the affordances of using mixed methods (QUAN + QUAL) in learner language analysis. I´ll argue that the study of adverbs can be of potential interest to SLA researchers working on complexity and variation (Gablasova et al, 2016; Romero-Trillo, 2002) and, more generally, I´ll extend the contributions of corpus-driven learner language studies outlined, among others, in Mukherjee (2009) and Gablasova et al. (2017). Although the LINDSEI and the extended LOCNEC cannot be considered as pedagogical corpora (Pérez-Paredes, 2010b), some of these findings can be of interest to language teachers and may effectively inform HE and adult language teaching practice.
References
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Biodata
Pascual Pérez-Paredes is a Lecturer in Research in Second Language Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. His main research interests are learner language variation, the use of corpora in language education and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, He has published research in journals such as CALL, Language, Learning & Technology, System, ReCALL, Discourse & Society and the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.