Making a little go a long way: A corpus-based analysis of a high-frequency word and some pedagogical implications for young Spanish learners

This study explores the different uses of the word little, its equivalents in Spanish and its teaching to young Spanish learners. First, it aims at analyzing the lexico-grammatical behavior of little in a corpus of children’s short stories, where its prevailing use, preceding countable nouns, has be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of English studies 2019-01, Vol.19 (1), p.1-20
Main Author: de la Cruz, Belen Labrador
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Child Language
Children
Childrens Literature
Childrens short stories
Childrens Television
Computational Linguistics
Contrastive analysis
Contrastive Linguistics
Corpus analysis
Corpus linguistics
Course Descriptions
Diminutives and augmentatives
English
English (Second Language)
English as a second language
English as a second language instruction
English as a second language teaching methods
English Instruction
Foreign Countries
Foreign language learning
Grammar
Language instruction
Language Usage
Linguistics
Native Language
North American English
Nouns
Nursery Rhymes
Parallel corpora
Phonemes
Phonetics
Phonology
Phrase Structure
Second Language Instruction
Second Language Learning
Semantics
Sound
Spanish
Spanish language
Suffixes
Task Analysis
Teachers
Teaching
Teaching Methods
Toys
Transfer of Training
Translation
Vowels
Word Frequency
Young Children
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Description
Summary:This study explores the different uses of the word little, its equivalents in Spanish and its teaching to young Spanish learners. First, it aims at analyzing the lexico-grammatical behavior of little in a corpus of children’s short stories, where its prevailing use, preceding countable nouns, has been found to be much more frequent than in other domains and registers. A contrastive study follows, which examines how little has been translated in an English-Spanish parallel corpus; the results show that diminutives constitute an important equivalent. Finally, some didactic implications are proposed, with the application of corpus-based findings to the teaching of English to young Spanish learners from an approach that combines lexical syllabi and story-based methodologies.
ISSN:1578-7044
1989-6131
DOI:10.6018/ijes.349311