L2 Proficiency and L2 Developmental Stages: A Learner Corpus Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents part of the results of a learner corpus study of English oral and written production by a large number of Japanese native speakers. Each participant was asked to perform two tasks, namely spoken and written narratives, using a picture book titled “Frog, where are you?” (Mayer, 1969) containing 24 wordless pictures. For the analyses in the current study, the data from 80 learners, focusing on audio-recorded and transcribed spoken narratives, was used. The Japanese learners’ speech production was examined based on Processability Theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998, 2005; Bettoni & Di Biase, 2015) as well as on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001). Results show that there is a correlation between second language (L2) proficiency levels and L2 developmental stages in a learner corpus of L2 spoken English. On the other hand, the dispersion is found to increase at higher stages as shown in previous studies (e.g., Granfeldt & Agren, 2013; Hagenfeld, 2017).