A study of how English-speaking learners of Spanish in the beyond-basic stage express temporality in personal narratives

Résumé

This qualitative, concept-oriented, corpus-driven study investigated the function and form of temporal words, phrases, and clauses in their discursive context in 34 personal narratives written by English-speaking learners of Spanish in a U.S. third-year college-level Spanish course, collected over multiple semesters. The results showed that learners at the beyond-basic stage used time expressions abundantly to complement their fairly well-developed but still evolving verb system. Temporal expressions were used most often to order events and actions chronologically and, secondly, for discourse management. Indicators of frequency and manner were rarer. Students most often relied on the principle of natural order, presenting events and actions in the order in which they occurred with no intervening time words. In order of decreasing frequency, learners employed verbless temporal adverbial phrases, expressions containing multiple time words, and temporal clauses. Genre, proficiency, and assignment instructions seemed to have influenced how the learners communicated temporality.