Newcastle Corpus
Description
The project "The Structure of French Interlanguage: A corpus-based study" was a three year project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (research grant number 112118) which ran from October 2005 to September 2008. The project co-directors were Florence Myles (Newcastle University) and Rosamond Mitchell (University of Southampton); Annabelle David (Newcastle) was the research associate working full time on the project, and Sarah Rule (Southampton) a part-time research associate. The Newcastle Corpus is the latest in a series of research projects since 2001 at the University of Southampton and Newcastle University, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the British Academy.
The specific aims of this project were:
- to create a new corpus of intermediate level spoken L2 French from 17-18 year old learners, in years 12 to 13 of UK secondary education, in order to complete the FLLOC collection to include learners from all levels from beginners to final year undergraduates;
- to add a small corpus of native speaker French to the collection, for comparison purposes;
- to exploit the entire set of corpora within FLLOC to produce a full account of the development of the language system of instructed learners of L2 French in a range of domains, including syntax, morphology and discourse; to maintain and update the existing corpora in line with evolving technical standards and to invite deposit of additional complementary corpora from other researchers.
Thirty learners were recruited from four different sixth form colleges and recorded performing a variety of oral tasks. Some of these tasks have been used in previous corpora, and some have been amended or newly created to match the learners' level. In addition, 15 native speakers have performed the same tasks.