International Journal of Learner Corpus Research - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2023

Abstract

This study aims to explore the potential of oral reading tasks to establish learners’ proficiency when compiling learner corpora. Informed by research on oral reading fluency, we selected a text containing a variety of linguistic features and submitted it to 68 English learners in Taiwan, who were interviewed for the construction of a large spoken corpus of L2 English across proficiency levels. Their proficiency was rated by trained Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001, 2018, 2020) raters and ranged from A1 to B2. The performances in the reading passage were analyzed for reading rate and reading disfluencies. The relationship between reading measures and language scores was analyzed using spine plots, revealing a strong association between reading rate and language level. The number of disfluencies did not show a significant association with language level when all disfluencies were counted together. However, when different types of disfluencies were treated separately, false starts were found to be associated with language level (even though the relationship was less clear than the one reported between reading rate and language level). The study demonstrates that including a carefully selected reading passage among the tasks when compiling spoken learner corpora may be an efficient way of collecting data relating to learner performance in speech.

Abstract

This paper investigates the possible benefits of integrating an L1 novice corpus into the study of learner writing, through a study on hedging adverbials and complement clauses. A more traditional tripartite comparison is first drawn between French EFL learner writing, L1 English novice writing, and English expert writing. Then, a comparison is made between L1 French novice writing and French EFL learner writing. The study uses data from the following corpora: the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA; Paquot et al., 2022) (French EFL learner writing), the British Academic Written English (BAWE; Heuboeck et al., 2008) corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP; Ädel & Römer, 2012) (both L1 English novice writing), the Kulturell Identitet i Akademisk Prosa: nasjonal versus disiplinavhengig (KIAP‑EN; Fløttum et al., 2006) corpus (English expert writing), and the The French Academic wRiting (FAR) corpus (L1 French novice writing). The results speak to the importance of including a L1 novice component to the current methodologies employed in Learner Corpus Research (LCR), since such inclusion helps to provide a better and more nuanced interpretation of the findings obtained by means of a more traditional tripartite approach.

Abstract

The present study examines the lexical patterning of altogether 4,022 instances of epistemic stance markers (EDs) across four levels of L2 proficiency (B1–C2) and three types of writing tasks (‘opinion’, ‘complaint’, and ‘letter’) by using the exploratory technique of Multiple Correspondence Analysis. The data stem from a Finnish learner English corpus, comprising of 1,773 texts. The results of the study showed that while the lexical patterns of EDs in the data seemed to be mostly related to task type, some proficiency-related patterns of ED use were observed across all tasks. In some cases, proficiency-related patterns could also only be observed in some of the tasks, suggesting task type and proficiency are, to some extent, interrelated when examining the use of EDs. The results thus suggest that both task- and proficiency-related constraints of EDs should be considered in both foreign language teaching and assessment.

Abstract

This paper introduces the open-source English Language Learning Insight, Proficiency and Skills Evaluation (ELLIPSE) corpus. The corpus comprises ~6,500 essays written by English language learners (ELLs). All essays were written during state-wide standardized annual testing in the United States. The essays were written on 29 different independent prompts that required no background knowledge on the part of the writer. Individual difference information is made available for each essay including economic status, gender, grade level (8–12), and race/ethnicity. Each essay was scored by two trained human raters for English language proficiency including an overall score of English proficiency and analytic scores for cohesion, syntax, vocabulary, phraseology, grammar, and conventions. The paper provides reliability on the human judgments of proficiency reported for the corpus. The ELLIPSE corpus addresses many of the concerns found in existing learner corpora including unique holistic and analytic scores for each ELL essay. The corpus also includes limited demographic and individual difference data for each ELL.

This article reviews Designing and Evaluating Language Corpora: A Practical Framework for Corpus Representativeness9781107151383

This article reviews Beyond Concordance Lines: Corpora in language education9789027209894

This article reviews Multiple Perspectives on Learner Interaction. The Corpus of Collaborative Oral Tasks9781501517372