Some lexical properties of Lithuanian learner language: a focus on beginner learners

Abstract

The aim of this research is to explore the productive vocabulary that beginner learners of Lithuanian as a foreign language (LFL) use when speaking and writing. LFL, being a lesser used and lesser taught language, has been studied to a rather limited extent (e. g. Dabašinskienė & Čubajevaitė (2009), Ramonaitė (2015, 2017a, 2017b)), and learner corpora were not available for a rather long time. The present study is based on the newly developed Lithuanian Learner Corpus (LLC) and is limited to the subcorpus of beginner texts (103,148 tokens). The research is based mainly on frequency lists and generated with the AntConc software. The questions addressed here are as follows: (a) What are the most frequent lexical items in Lithuanian learner language (LLL) in level A1?; (b) How are different lexical items distributed in spoken and written texts?; (c) What do n-grams show about the usage patterns of these lexical items in LLL? The preliminary results show that the lexical diversity in beginner LLL is rather low. The most frequent lexical items are nouns, while verbs, adverbs, and especially adjectives are considerably less frequent. The lexical sets of the most frequent items appear to be tightly linked to the textbook curriculum. The analysis of 4-grams and 3-grams shows that vocabulary in A1 is used in highly formulaic patterns. Thus, beginner learners of Lithuanian use minimal lexical resources and focus mainly on the referential function of language; lexical items used for pragmatic purposes are scarcely used, which may point to some limitations in the existing teaching resources and curricula.