The COPLE2 corpus: a learner corpus for Portuguese

The COPLE2 Corpus: a Learner Corpus for Portuguese Amália Mendes, Sandra Antunes, Maarten Janssen, Anabela Gonçalves Universidade de Lisboa – FLUL/CLUL Alameda da Universidade, Lisboa, Portugal {amalia.mendes; sandra.antunes}@clul.ul.pt, maarten.janssen@campus.ul.pt, A.Goncalves@letras.ulisboa.pt Abstract We present the COPLE2 corpus, a learner corpus of Portuguese that includes written and spoken texts produced by learners of Portuguese as a second or foreign language. The corpus includes at the moment a total of 182,474 tokens and 978 texts, classified according to the CEFR scales. The original handwritten productions are transcribed in TEI compliant XML format and keep record of all the original information, such as reformulations, insertions and corrections made by the teacher, while the recordings are transcribed and aligned with EXMARaLDA. The TEITOK environment enables different views of the same document (XML, student version, corrected version), a CQP-based search interface, the POS, lemmatization and normalization of the tokens, and will soon be used for error annotation in stand-off format. The corpus has already been a source of data for phonological, lexical and syntactic interlanguage studies and will be used for a data-informed selection of language features for each proficiency level. Keywords: learner corpus, corpus compilation, language learning/teaching 1. Introduction The COPLE2 corpus1 is a written and spoken learner corpus (i.e., a corpus of productions by foreign or second language learners (Leech, 1998)) for Portuguese that aims at providing empirical data for the teaching and learning of Portuguese as a second language (L2) or foreign language (FL). Over the past few years we are seeing a substantial growth in the area of learner corpus research applied to other languages besides English. The COPLE2 corpus will contribute to broaden this emerging domain by providing data for the global Romance language that is Portuguese. The corpus includes 978 learner productions and a total of 182,474 tokens. By including learners of Portuguese with different mother tongues (L1), it furthermore provides a resource for the development of interlanguage studies and teaching materials that target specific L1s. The corpus is available online using the TEITOK environment that offers a rich set of functionalities for the corpus administrators as well as users/visitors2. English learner corpora, such as the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al., 2009), the Longman Learner's Corpus, or the Cambridge Learner Corpus (Nicholls, 2003), have been developed in the recent years for different L1. The importance of such empirical data has been increasingly recognised for studies in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and language teaching/learning, although they are far from achieving their full potential impact, in part due to the lack of resources for languages besides English. Initiatives such as the compilation of corpora for French (Delais-Roussarie & Yoo, 2010) and Spanish (Lozano, 2009) are a few examples of resources that address this shortcoming. Some few recent corpora have been devised to illustrate the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages – CEFR (Council of Europe, 1 http://www.clul.ul.pt/en/research-teams/547 2 http://alfclul.clul.ul.pt/teitok/learnercorpus 2001) with learner texts produced in CEFR-related tests. It is the case, for instance, of the Cambridge Learner Corpus …

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