Corpus for Children’s Writing with Enhanced Output for Specific Spelling Patterns (2nd and 3rd Grade)

Corpus for Children’s Writing with Enhanced Output for Specific Spelling Patterns (2nd and 3rd Grade) Kay Berkling Cooperative State University Karlsruhe, Germany berkling@dhbw-karlsruhe.de Abstract This paper describes the collection of the H1 Corpus of children’s weekly writing over the course of 3 months in 2nd and 3rd grades, aged 7-11. The texts were collected within the normal classroom setting by the teacher. Texts of children whose parents signed the permission to donate the texts to science were collected and transcribed. The corpus consists of the elicitation techniques, an overview of the data collected and the transcriptions of the texts both with and without spelling errors, aligned on a word by word basis, as well as the scanned in texts. The corpus is available for research via Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). Researchers are strongly encouraged to make additional annotations and improvements and return it to the public domain via LDC. Keywords: Orthography, Corpora, Children’s Texts, Digitization, Anonymization 1. Introduction Reading and Spelling are key skills acquired by children during their first four years of school. According to PISA and IGLU (OECD, 2014), a significant number of school children are still left behind in Germany. PISA (2000- 2012) has documented a significant discrepancy between students’ scores. It is generally known that underachieve- ment in reading and spelling acquisition can stem from a lack of a variety of skills, including phonemic aware- ness, knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and reading (Read, 1975; Bissex, 1985; Wagner et al., 1994; Treiman, 1993). In addition to that, Germany has a number of children with migrant backgrounds, only those with foreign nationality entering the official statistics. De- spite almost two decades of effort to increase the number of foreign children participating at the level of Gymnasium, the statistics since 1995 have not changed much. These children grow up in multilingual environments. Their lack of German language skills compounds the pro- cess of writing skill acquisition in several areas. The de- gree to which these skills are acquired furthermore has a direct impact on students’ scholastic performance across subjects and can prevent academic performance that would lead to the ability to obtain an education degree or continue to higher education. PISA categorizes around 29% of chil- dren with 2nd generation migration background below level 2 in Mathematics. (OECD, 2014, Table II.3.7). In order to prevent problematic developments, early read- ing, spelling and language skills have to be targeted in spe- cific interventions (National Reading Panel, 2000). Espe- cially reading and spelling interventions administered from Grade 1 to Grade 2 show positive effects (Suggate, 2014). In order for instructional material, diagnostics and interven- tion to be effective, more research is needed to understand how writing skill acquisition develops. Due to technology for automated spelling analysis (Berkling et al., 2011) a de- tailed study of typical orthographic skills in a large corpus (Lavalley et al., 2015) has revealed that several categories of spelling errors persist to a significant degree up to eighth grade. To study these phenomena in more detail, relevant …

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