A learner corpus is a rich collection of data, regarding the utterances and errors made by students in their Spanish assessments. Applied linguistics has been compiling such corpora so that they can be analysed at a certain language level. Learner corpora have been absent in the research on the Spanish produced by our Irish students. The literature available generalizes about Irish-English examples as English speaking corpora. Our teaching experience shows that the Spanish used by our students differs from other English speakers, due to the role of Irish in their education. CLISA (Corpus of Learners of Irish Spanish level A) is a project supported by the research fund in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway) in its infancy. At the moment, we are producing applied materials and articles derived from this initial phase. This project aims at filling that gap by looking at the Spanish produced in NUI Galway at the end of first year. This project will distributed at conferences and journals in the hope it will develop in other institutions and into other languages levels.
CLISA is a limited corpus study of learners of Spanish in Ireland with the purpose of creating materials that can be shared by teachers and learners of Spanish in Ireland and other countries. Our initial research project May 2019 – December 2020 focused on the collection and analysis of oral and written samples from first year students at the University setting in the West of Ireland with a European level of A1-A2.
Dr Pilar Alderete Diez is the principal investigator of this project. This is the first corpus research project she has led and has been undertaking training at the University of Limerick. For more information: http://www.nuigalway.ie/our-research/people/languages-literatures-and-cultures/pilaralderete/
Ms Cristina García Sánchez was the hired research assistant who conducted the preliminary research on error classification and qualitative analysis of the student samples from June 2019 – April 2020.
If you want more information about this project carried out under the umbrella of the Community of Practice ELE in Eirínn, you may write to eleineirinn@gmail.com with the subject title: CLISA.
Our logo and site photo have been attributed to @Brett_Jordan in Unsplash.
This research has been funded by the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies at the University of Galway.
Corpus of Learners - Irish Students 