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

Abstract

[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.