SweLL on the rise: Swedish Learner Language corpus for European Reference Level studies

SweLL on the rise: Swedish Learner Language corpus for European Reference Level studies Elena Volodina1, Ildik´o Pil´an1, Ingegerd Enstr¨om1, Lorena Llozhi1, Peter Lundkvist2, Gunl¨og Sundberg2, Monica Sandell3 1 Spr˚akbanken, University of Gothenburg, Sweden 2 Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University, Sweden 3 Center for Language Introduction, Gothenburg, Sweden elena.volodina@svenska.gu.se Abstract We present a new resource for Swedish, SweLL, a corpus of Swedish Learner essays linked to learners’ performance according to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). SweLL consists of three subcorpora – SpIn, SW1203 and Tisus, collected from three different educational establishments. The common metadata for all subcorpora includes age, gender, native languages, time of residence in Sweden, type of written task. Depending on the subcorpus, learner texts may contain additional information, such as text genres, topics, grades. Five of the six CEFR levels are represented in the corpus: A1, A2, B1, B2 and C1 comprising in total 339 essays. C2 level is not included since courses at C2 level are not offered. The work flow consists of collection of essays and permits, essay digitization and registration, meta-data annotation, automatic linguistic annotation. Inter-rater agreement is presented on the basis of SW1203 subcorpus. The work on SweLL is still ongoing with more that 100 essays waiting in the pipeline. This article both describes the resource and the “how-to” behind the compilation of SweLL. Keywords: CEFR levels, learner corpus, digital resources for second language research 1. Introduction With globalization and a growing number of people seeking asylum, better work or better living conditions in Europe in general and in Sweden in our particular case (Migra- tionsverket, 2014), the need for effective foreign and sec- ond language (L2) teaching and analysis of L2 is in every way important. Access to digitized samples of language that L2 learners produce can facilitate L2 research into us- age of various linguistic aspects, constructions and com- petences, move forward development of methods for au- tomatic L2 analysis and become a way to optimize both teaching and creation of new learning tools and materials. The SweLL corpus presented here is a collection of learner- written essays at different proficiency levels, as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference (Council of Europe, 2001). As such, the corpus is an evidence of learner language that facilitates research on interlanguage (Selinker, 1972), which is a term for a dynamically devel- oping system that L2 learners build before they become proficient in the target language. Interlanguage has been a focus of much linguistic and pedagogical research over the past decades (Selinker, 1972), whereas computational linguistic methods for interlanguage analysis only recently have started to gain international attention and are currently explored for languages that offer electronic access to an- notated learner data, such as essays and speech transcripts (Rosen et al., 2014). Research on L2 acquisition and learning was for long based on assumptions of language, rather than on the study of learners’ developing language, or interlanguage. Empiri- cal studies on interlanguage have been carried out since the …

Content truncated to 500 words