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

• Labrador de la Cruz, Belén ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de León

     Universidad de León

     León, España

     
• Localización: IJES: international journal of English studies, ISSN 1578-7044, ISSN-e 1989-6131, Vol. 19, Nº. 1, 2019 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Open Issue), págs. 1-20
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • 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.