Abstract Summary
In this talk we will present “The multilingual pupil”: a collaborative learner corpus project involving teachers, pupils, researchers and teacher educators. The project aims to investigate pupils’ development of written skills in L2 and L3 languages as well as teachers’ written feedback practices and how these might influence learner writing.
Abstract :
“The multilingual pupil” is the name of a learner corpus project which includes researchers in SLA, language education and corpus linguistics as well as teacher educators, language teachers, pupils, and school leaders. The project aims to investigate pupils’ development of written skills in L2 and L3 languages learnt in Norwegian schools, as well as teachers’ written feedback practices and how these might influence the pupils’ writing. A structured set of authentic pupils’ texts written in English, French, German and Spanish (the TRAWL corpus) is currently being compiled to form the basis of this research. Each participating pupil hands in the texts s/he writes over a period of at least two years, which adds a true longitudinal aspect to the corpus. The texts are collected in two versions: the original text as handed in by the pupil and the text as it looks when handed back to the pupil by the teacher, i.e. with teacher comments and corrections. Supplementary documents such as assignments, instructions and evaluation criteria are also collected. Once the documents have been digitalized and annotated, the corpus will be made available online for other researchers and educators.
In this talk, we will first present the corpus design and then describe the compilation process including practical, ethical and technical challenges we met along the way and how we solved them or plan to solve them. Finally, we will present some thoughts on how we best can disseminate the research findings on written language development and feedback practices in order to ensure a proper interaction between educational practices and research findings. We believe that for the dissemination process to be successful, it should include active involvement by as many as possible of the groups of actors involved, especially the participating teachers.
