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 Vol.11 

Study of the Verbs Used in the Reading Comprehension Examinations of the Diplomas in Spanish as a Foreign Language (DELE)


Author
Lo-Hsueh Lu ; Heng-Hui Lin
Synopsis

This paper aims to investigate the verbs used in the Reading Comprehension Examinations of DELE. Integrating the theories and techniques of Corpus Linguistics, specially the "Corpus Tool" by UAM, we plan to observe the verbs used by the Spanish speaking people because the verbs as their grammatical function are very important in foreign language learning. The data that we are going to discuss are collected from the written texts in the Reading Comprehension Examination of level B1 and B2. In the beginning, we'll analyze the use of the verbs in the temporal and aspectual domain. Then, we tend to study the frequency of use of the verbs that appear in different texts included in the tests from 2005 to 2009. Then, we will study the text type and theme in order to be aware of the preference of the text chosen in DELE. Finally, we will discuss the interrelationship among text themes and text types as well as the use of verbs. We hope that the expected results of our research will provide useful references for teaching Spanish reading and for improving students' reading comprehension as well as for giving useful guide to those who want to pass DELE examinations in the future.