News

We are proud to announce that Keran Mu, a doctoral researcher and member of the iRead4Skills project team, has recently published a significant academic article in the journal Langue(s) & Parole. Her research directly draws from and contributes to the work we are doing within the iRead4Skills initiative, highlighting the practical applications of our corpus in understanding cross-linguistic learning.

In her article titled “L’effet facilitateur de la transparence interlinguistique sur l’acquisition lexicale du français et de l’espagnol chez les apprenants sinophones” (The facilitating effect of interlinguistic transparency on lexical acquisition of French and Spanish among Sinophone learners), Keran investigates how knowledge of English and one Romance language can aid in learning another Romance language.

A central component of her methodology involved using the iRead4Skills Spanish corpus, a collection of authentic, leveled texts developed by our project, as a comparative benchmark against textbooks designed for Chinese learners.

Keran’s work exemplifies how iRead4Skills resources are being used in linguistic research. Her analysis compared:

• Spanish vocabulary from textbooks for Chinese learners.
• French vocabulary from similar textbooks.
• The iRead4Skills naturalistic Spanish corpus, designed for native speakers.

This unique comparison allowed her to uncover how “lexical transparency”, the recognizable similarity of words across languages, functions differently for learners versus native speakers, providing valuable insights for language pedagogy and materials development.

Full article: https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/languesparole.150