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

  1. Labrador de la Cruz, Belén 1
  1. 1 Universidad de León
    info

    Universidad de León

    León, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02tzt0b78

Journal:
IJES: international journal of English studies

ISSN: 1578-7044,  1989-6131

Year of publication: 2019

Issue Title: Open Issue

Volume: 19

Issue: 1

Pages: 1-20

Type: Article

DOI: 10.6018/IJES.349311 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDIGITUM editor

More publications in: IJES: international journal of English studies

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Abstract

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.

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Funding information

This paper has been financially supported by project FFI2016-75672-R (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness).

Funders

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