Analyzing part-of-speech variability in a longitudinal learner corpus and a pedagogic corpus

Abstract

This study investigates the development of part-of-speech variety in the writing of a cohort of beginning college-level learners of German over three semesters of study in comparison with the pedagogical input they received from their workbook. The study fills existing gaps in Second Language Acquisition research by targeting beginner learners of German as a foreign language, analyzing semi-automatically annotated corpora (a learner corpus and a corresponding workbook corpus), and eliciting learner data over a long period of time at dense time intervals. As a result, it presents a developmental Second Language (L2) profile of the target learner population in terms of verb classes and verb morphology. The study shows how participants gradually enrich their verb form repertoire, both in accordance with and diverging from the pedagogical input they receive.