Japanese L1 speakers blogging in Spanish: motivations, topics and linguistic properties

Abstract

[Abstract] Corpus-based research on learner written language is usually based on corpora made of assignments or exams. In this paper, we instead study personal blogs of learners, since they are a good source of information about learners’ motivation to write in a foreign language and their favorite topics, and they have particular linguistic properties. We constructed a blog corpus made up of 2,125 texts coming from 48 Spanish blogs written by 43 Japanese L1 speakers. We find that the main motivations to write a blog are documenting one’s life and explaining Japanese culture to a foreign reader. With regard to their linguistic properties, blogs have much in common with both spoken and ritten language, and the language used is rather informal: we find a higher proportion of lexical verbs, adverbs and personal pronouns and interestingly, it contains also foreign words (Japanese words) and emoticons with various functions.