Resumen de Grammatical and lexical Development during Study Abroad: Research on a Corpus of spoken L2 Chinese
Research investigating the effect of study abroad on the development of grammatical accuracy has produced conflicting results. Using corpus linguistics research methods—yet to be used more extensively in SLA research—this study investigated students' acquisition of grammatical accuracy and lexical development during study abroad in China on data from a subgroup of 62 students in a corpus of over 1 million characters of transcribed spoken L2 Chinese produced by 89 American college students who studied in China for a semester or academic year. Results show that the students made significant progress in their accuracy of using the perfective aspect marker 了le; they used more sophisticated vocabulary; and for the two words that mean “but” in English, they shifted from using the less frequent word 可是kěshì to the more frequent但是 dànshì, towards the native norm. The significance of such research and pedagogical implications are discussed.
