CROSSING AND BRIDGING SPACES IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: A CORPUS-BASED INVESTIGATION OF MOTION TALK BY AMERICAN LEARNERS OF RUSSIAN
Open Access
- Author:
- Driagina, Viktoria V
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 10, 2007
- Committee Members:
- James Lantolf, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Karen E Johnson, Committee Member
Celeste S Kinginger, Committee Member
Steve L Thorne, Committee Member
Benjamin Rifkin, Committee Member - Keywords:
- second language acquisition
corpus analysis
Russian
verbs of motion
motion - Abstract:
- Every sphere of human life and development is intimately connected with motion. Just as motion is interwoven into our way of life, linguistic expressions of motion events permeate human language. For second language (L2) learners, the ability to express and understand motion events as they are encoded in an L2 is central for their successful interaction, functioning, and socialization in a new linguistic and cultural community. My dissertation employs contrastive learner corpus analysis (CLCA) methodology to investigate to what extent highly proficient American learners of Russian (RL2) are able to utilize the lexical, semantic, and structural potential of Russian in unrehearsed contextualized descriptions of motion events. The study draws on a large spoken learner corpus, as well as parallel baseline native Russian and English corpora comprised of narratives elicited through visual stimuli (two short movie clips and a picture book). The dissertation investigates which linguistic structures are favored by the participants (Russian and English native speakers as well as RL2 learners) in the context of the same narrative tasks. Drawing on the learner corpus, the study additionally analyzes learner choices and discussed the most problematic aspects of motion talk for RL2 learners with varying levels of experience in using Russian in communicative contexts. By offering empirically-based insights into the use and acquisition of RL2 motion talk, the study contributes to the under-researched fields of RL2 learning and teaching. The study additionally contributes to the field by proposing new ways of teaching motion talk and developing innovative corpus-based materials for RL2 learners of different proficiency levels.