Researching learner language through POS keyword and syntactic complexity analyses

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we explore the affordances of two different research methods that may be instrumental in analysing learner language complexity: standard corpus linguistics methodology and automatic syntactic complexity analysers. Our results suggest that POS keyword analysis and automatic syntactic analysis are both effective for the identification of linguistic features at different levels of development in instructed SLA. In particular, countable nouns, prepositional phrases, verbs and general adverbs are criterial features that define the transition from lower to higher secondary school language learning in the Spanish component of the ICCI corpus. We suggest that the analysis of complexity in noun phrases is of great interest for researchers and teachers in terms of identifying development milestones in language acquisition.

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