Acquisition of articles by Estonian learners of Spanish as L3: a corpus study

Abstract

This study delves into the use of Spanish articles by Estonian students learning Spanish as their third language (L3). This topic has received little attention to date, despite evidence that it represents one of the greatest challenges Estonian learners of Spanish face, and it appears that these difficulties persist even at higher levels of Spanish proficiency (Kruse 2018: 126). This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of how Estonian students use Spanish articles. 345 written texts from a learner corpus have been analysed. Results show that the most common error among learners is omission of the article, in line with previous research, but also an unexpectedly high incidence of morphological and syntactic errors. Moreover, it has been detected that there is not a significant improvement in article acquisition between levels A1 and B1. By addressing these objectives, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the specific difficulties faced by Estonian learners and the broader landscape of article acquisition in a third language context.