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Building an Oral and Written Learner Corpus of a School Programme: Methodological Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2020

By
Philippa Bell ,
Laura Collins  and
Emma Marsden
Edited by
Bert Le Bruyn  and
Magali Paquot
Bert Le Bruyn
Affiliation:
UIL-OTS, Utrecht University
Magali Paquot
Affiliation:
FNRS – Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, UCLouvain
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Summary

The importance of methodological transparency in Learner Corpus Research is paramount for correct understanding and interpretation of knowledge created using corpora. Increasing calls for open-access corpora amplify the need for transparency. This paper details a pilot study conducted to understand the importance of methodological decisions on the subsequent corpus by examining (a) the effects of language used to provide instructions on text length and L1 use and (b) the chosen elicitation tasks in terms of student interest and ability to differentiate proficiency across school grade levels. Furthermore, it details transcription and annotation challenges that had to be addressed. The aim of the chapter is to demonstrate the numerous decisions and their effects at all stages of corpus building, and the importance of working towards transparent reporting of methodologies and standardisation of transcription and annotation where possible.

Keywords

corpora methodological transparencyoral/written L2 corporaforeign language learningelicitation taskslearner language transcriptionadolescent language learnerscompulsory language educationopen-access corpora
Type
Chapter
Information
Learner Corpus Research Meets Second Language Acquisition , pp. 214 - 242
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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