The acquisition of lexical mapping in English as a second language : a study using two learner corpora

This paper presents part of the results of a learner corpus study of the acquisition of English as a second language (L2) based on two cross-sectional corpora constructed independently in Japan and Australia, namely Japanese Learner Corpus of English Narratives (JaLCEN) and WSU-Xi’an Jiaotong ESL Corpus. Different data elicitation tasks were used for these corpora, that is, oral and written narratives for JaLCEN and various spoken and written tasks for WSU-Xi’an Jiaotong ESL Corpus. The present study examines the spoken narratives by 88 Japanese native (L1) speakers from JaLCEN and the picture description spoken data by 51 learners in Australia with Japanese L1 and Chinese L1 backgrounds from WSU-Xi’an Jiaotong ESL Corpus. The study investigates acquisition of English grammar, focusing on the lexical mapping, based on the developmental stages defined by the Lexial Mapping Hypothesis (LMH) within Processability Theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998; Bettoni & Di Biase, 2015a). Analyses show that learners from both corpora exhibited an implicational relationship following the PT developmental stages when the emergence criterion was used and that different data-collection tasks did not affect the developmental sequence. This study contributes to the further understanding of systematic aspects of L2 acquisition. It also suggests that different learner corpora may be used to investigate the development of L2 grammar.