Comparative study of comprehension and production of the Spanish aspectual past tenses by Mandarin Chinese speakers as Foreign Language

Abstract

This work is a study on the levels of acquisition of the Spanish aspectual past tenses by Mandarin Chinese speakers based on a corpus data, as well as on our previous works on it. The aim of this paper is to synthesize and evaluate the IL competence of Chinese learners concerning Spanish L2 aspect through comprehension and production tasks. Data from Mandarin Chinese L1 learners of different levels of linguistic competence (ranging from B1 to C1) were gathered and analyzed for showing differences across levels and tasks. A difference in the relationship between comprehension and production data was found in the acquisition process of L2 Spanish. Results show that our learners can only grasp part of the input information, but they still seek for more information from new input to fill the gap in comprehension, whereas they also implement a production strategy according to this new input. Nevertheless, this strategy turns out to be more a mechanical rule rather than an internalized pattern close to native speakers’ production.