Corporum (Dec 2023)
Learners’ Profiles for Language Teaching: A Corpus Study of Pakistani Students Errors in Spanish Language
Abstract
The study measured the effects of building learner profiles for homogeneous groups of students to increase the effectiveness of Spanish language teaching to foreigners. Studies on the effectiveness of learning profiles of L2 students for addressing their language learning needs are almost inexistent.The corpora were collected following an adaptation of the model of Tare et al. (2014). Subsequently, the Tare et al. model for the collection of the corpus was applied. Once the corpus was collected, latest software like OCR Stylus (2022), MAT tagger andAntConc were utilized to analyze the corpus. For this analysis the Elliserror analysis approach(2005) was applied, to reveal common patterns of errors when producing a student output in Spanish language. The results show that Pakistani immigrants present similar characteristics demographically and linguistically and a large number oferrors in Spanish language usage derive from their L1. The profile built was tested for a year and utilized for the improvement of teaching and learning materials with positive results. The analysis resulted in a language profile that can be utilized for the teaching of Spanish language to Pakistani learners in any language center by any instructor.
