CEFLE and Direkt Profil: a New Computer Learner Corpus in French L2 and a System for Grammatical Profiling

AbstractThe importance of computer learner corpora for research in both second language acquisition and foreign language teaching is rapidly increasing. Computer learner corpora can provide us with data to describe the learner’s interlanguage system at different points of its development and they can be used to create pedagogical tools. In this paper, we first present a new computer learner corpus in French. We then describe an analyzer called Direkt Profil, that we have developed using this corpus. The system carries out a sentence analysis based on developmental sequences, i.e. local morphosyntactic phenomena linked to a development in the acquisition of French as a foreign language. We present a brief introduction to developmental sequences and some examples in French. In the final section, we introduce and evaluate a method to optimize the definition and detection of learner profiles using machine-learning techniques.