Marco Berton

My research interests cover areas such as foreign language vocabulary acquisition, task-based language teaching (TBLT), foreign language writing and linguistic complexity (lexical and syntactic). All of them are to a high degree related to the didactics of Spanish, as the increasing amount of knowledge deriving from research in these fields is commonly aimed at providing a basis for the implementation of language curricula and the improvement of language teaching techniques. Vocabulary acquisition is seldom addressed in second language syllabi, as its acquisition is still considered a mystery by most teachers. In fact, vocabulary acquisition has been extensively studied in the last decades and its explicit acquisition can be easily implemented in almost any second language course. On the contrary, second language writing is often present in any syllabus. In spite of it, very rarely the cognitive aspect of second language writing and, in particular, task complexity, is taken into consideration. My research experience in quantitative linguistics comprises the use of several statistical tests performed by means of the software SPSS. Besides, I worked with several online tools originally developed for the analysis of English texts whose adaptability to being used for analysing Spanish texts was successfully tested within my PhD research project.