PhD position

A PdD position is available associated to the project " Processing and cataloging of a written corpus in ELE produced by Chinese students (ECCOTEELE)"

The summary of the project is:

One of the challenges of Spanish society is the internationalization of spanish language. China is an emerging country with great economic potential. Today China shows a growing interest in the Spanish language. Different Chinese universities dedicated to international studies are creating Spanish departments. Spanish is the second most spoken language as a first language in the world; the first is Mandarin. The teaching of Spanish in China follows the traditional model of teaching of foreign languages, the method grammartranslate.

This method not facilitates the acquisition of language skills or the integration of grammar and culture in communicative interaction, which entails a number of difficulties when Chinese people learn Spanish. On the other hand , research about teaching and learning the Spanish as a foreign language (ELE) needs to overcome the introspection as a method of linguistic analysis to answer questions such as what linguistic exponents are the most difficult to learn and why, what errors are the most frequent, in which levels, what type they are, what linguistic and extralinguistic factors involved in its occurrence and the fossilization of some of them, efficiency that have different ways of repairing the error and in which kind of students, etc. The answer to this type of research questions only can be scientific if it is based on a large set of real oral and/or written texts produced by ELEs students and collected with the Corpus  Linguistics methods.

This project aims to respond to these two challenges: 1) the Spanish language internationalization offering materials to Chinese students learn it better, and 2) the scientific development of the research in ELE. For this purpose, this project will develop and catalog a corpus of texts produced by Chinese University students of ELE in order to: 1) gather a database of Spanish interlanguage of Chinese people, 2) reliable and verifiable researches that answer the questions posed above and others questions that may arise in the future. The texts will be obtained from students of ELE from several Chinese universities (Tianjin, Soochow and Changzhou) and Chinese students in mobility in the University of Lleida and Valencia. We will determine the for selection and cataloging criteria. These criteria should be few, well differentiated among themselves and easy to identify, according to the General guidelines of European projects aimed at creating large written corpus of second languages. These criteria should seek representation, balance and uniformity. The texts will be digitized and electronically tagged for easy access, query and emptying. An interdisciplinary team will develop the project. Its members have collaborated on ELE teaching and some of them in research on corpora. We intend to lay the groundwork for future research projects on ELE. Each member will bring their research experience