Oral Production of Discourse Markers by Intermediate Learners of Spanish: A Corpus Perspective

Abstract

This study describes the oral production of discourse markers by 40 (N = 40) learners of Spanish and compares it with usage by native speakers (N = 4). Our data belong to a learner corpus of oral interviews with university learners from over nine language backgrounds at intermediate level: A2 (N = 20) and B1 (N = 20) (Common European Framework of Reference). Semiautomatic part-of-speech (POS) tagging was used to count and retrieve the discourse markers produced by each group of learners and the group of native speakers. Results show a slight increase in the acquisition of these particles from A2 to B1, although the production is still lower when compared with the group of native speakers. Certain groups of students (especially Chinese learners) show a poorer usage of this category in our data, which could reveal a certain difficulty acquiring fluency at the discourse level. A breakdown of the most used discourse markers in our corpus (in native and non-native speakers, and at A2 and B1) is presented, as well as a distribution across interviews of the ten most frequent markers. Results are discussed comparing the usage data in our corpus with teaching guidelines for Spanish.