The Aprescrilov corpus, or broadening the horizon of Spanish language learning in Flanders

Abstract

Learner corpora (LC) are increasingly gaining interest, particularly with regard to their potential to facilitate research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). However, there appears to be a lack of progress in establishing strong, bidirectional links between LC and SLA / FLT, due to (i) a shortage of longitudinal studies that would allow scholars to establish causality in interpreting corpus data analyses, and even better, test the efficiency of pedagogical adjustments and (ii) the fact that it is more typical of LC analysis to describe learner language rather than attempt to explain it (Hasko 2013: 4–5). In this chapter, we aim to contribute to narrowing the gap between LC and FLT by showing how we use the Aprescrilov corpus in order to perform longitudinal studies, leading to useful insights in SLA and to an analysis of what triggered learners to make errors and how they can be avoided. Finally, we here show how impact studies based on LC can lead to considerable improvements in language teaching and learning, in this case of Spanish as a FL.