Prompt response variation in learner corpus research: Implications for data interpretation

While general first language corpora are composed of samples from various naturalistic sources (e.g., websites, books), language samples in most written learner corpora (LC) are texts produced in response to prompts. In this context, LC users need to develop a clear awareness of the affordances and limitations of specific prompts and how responses to said prompts may affect the investigation of their intended object(s) of study. Through an analysis of the presence/absence of specific Spanish verb tenses in texts written in response to two supposedly narrative prompts in a Spanish LC (COWS-L2H; Yamada et al., 2020), this article illustrates the impact of inter- and intra-prompt response variation on LC data interpretation. Based on this evidence, we caution against rapid assumptions about text content based solely on the superficial phrasing of LC writing prompts. Instead, we recommend that LC users perform in-depth quantitative and qualitative analyses of learners’ samples written in response to each prompt they aim to include in their study prior to running statistical models on those data.