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

[EN] 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, h...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Labrador de la Cruz, María Belén
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Institución:Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Repositorio:BULERIA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de León
OAI Identifier:oai:buleria.unileon.es:10612/19448
Acceso en línea:https://revistas.um.es/ijes/article/view/349311
https://hdl.handle.net/10612/19448
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Lengua inglesa
English language teaching
Corpus
Little
Young learners
Lexical syllabus
Stories
5701.11 Enseñanza de Lenguas
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] 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.