UWI French L2 Corpus

Hugues Peters School of Humanities and Languages University of NSW, Sydney h.peters@unsw.edu.au website

Citation information

Peters, H. (2019). Asymmetric self-repair in gender attribution. In Degand, L.; Gilquin, G.; Meurant, L.; Simon, A. C. (Eds.), Fluency and Disfluency across Languages and Language Varieties: Corpora and Language in Use. Presses universitaires de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, 261 - 281. link to download

Peters, H. (2014). Etude sur la complémentation infinitive des verbes de déplacement sur la base d'un corpus de productions orales d'apprenants jamaicains de FLE et suggestions pédagogiques. In de Serres, L.; Ghillebaert, F.; Mather, P. A.; Bosch, A. (Eds.), Aspects culturels, linguistiques et didactiques de l'enseignement-apprentissage du français à un public non-francophone. Association Internationale des Etudes Québécoises, Québec, 62 – 84.

Journal References:

Peters, H. (2017). Comportements d'autocorrection et d'hésitation manifestés par les apprenants de FLE au cours de conversations orales spontanées. Bulletin Association Suisse de Linguistique Appliquée (VALS-ASLA), Numéro Spécial, 2, 133-145.

Peters, H. & Stewart, M. (2009). The syntax of determination in a corpus of oral productions of Jamaican learners of French: word order and agreement patterns in nominal phrases. The International Journal of the Humanities, 7, 51-62. link to download

Peters, H. (2009). Développement d’un corpus oral d’apprenants: apport à la didactique du français langue étrangère dans les Caraïbes anglophones. Cuadernos de Lingüística de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2(2), 21-32.

Peters, H. (2006). Development of a Longitudinal Oral Interlanguage Corpus of Jamaican Learners of French. Caribbean Journal of Education, 27, 201 – 222.

Peters, H. (2017). Morphosyntactic regularities in retracing phenomena in the speech of second language learners of French. In Degand, L. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Fluency and Disfluency Across Languages and Language Varieties (pp. 86-88). Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/195807

Peters, H. (2012). Non-finite complementation in French L2: a learner corpus approach. In Ponsonnet, M., Dao, L., & Bowler, M. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Australian Linguistic Society Conference (pp. 315-350). Australian National University, Canberra.

Peters, H. (2006). The acquisition of negative construals by Jamaican learners of French: A pedagogical orientation. In Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Research on Second and Foreign Language Acquisition and Teaching: Langues en contacts et appropriations. DILTEC, Sorbonne, Paris, France.

Peters, H. (2005). The syntax of negation in a corpus of oral productions of Jamaican learners of French L2 at the undergraduate level. In Konig, F., Gaies, S., Gao, Y., Li, F. & Tang, D. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching (pp. 558-568). Beijing, China.

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Usage Restrictions

There are no restrictions on the use of this data by TalkBank members, but please send notice of studies and articles using this corpus to the following contact:

Hugues Peters: h.peters@unsw.edu.au

Project Description

The UWI French corpus project (Constitution of an oral corpus of Jamaican learners of French at UWI, Mona) was initiated in 2003 by the investigator, Dr. Hugues PETERS, then lecturer at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica.

The corpus available on Talkbank investigates the language acquisition of French as a foreign language of nine adult Jamaican learners studying French at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona. It is constituted of transcriptions of 25 one-on-one interviews conducted in French between the students and the investigator. These informal interviews (two or three per student) took place between November 2003 and October 2004 at UWI, Mona. They consisted of various tasks destined to elicit grammatical structures (see the description below). The orthographic transcriptions of these interviews contain 15,068 token-words (9,532 learners' and 5,536 investigator's token-words) excluding all retraced material (16,818 words with retraced material included).

Apart from these 25 informal interviews included in the Talkbank database, there are 42 other interviews that occurred during end-of-semester formal language exams (from April 2003 to November 2004) and with a tenth participant who did not complete the Talkbank consent form. These are not included in the Talkbank repository. An initial statement of the objectives of the project appeared in PETERS (2005) (Development of a longitudinal oral interlanguage corpus of Jamaican learners of French. Caribbean Journal of Education 27(2): 75-96). The overall aim of the project was to establish a longitudinal learner corpus of spoken French by adult Jamaican learners of French in an instructed setting at the University level. The specific objectives of this project are to:

• collect, transcribe, and encode French oral production data by Jamaican learners of French L2 at the University level;
• analyse the development of specific morpho-syntactic features in the speech of these learners;
• inform theoretical debates on SLA acquisition in a diglossic context, specifically by native speakers of Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English;
• contribute to the development of pedagogical material better suited to the needs of learners in Jamaica and the English-speaking Caribbean;
• make this corpus available for educators and researchers.

All recordings have been transcribed and annotated by the investigator, Hugues PETERS, in CHAT format (MacWhinney 2000) between 2005 and 2017. The investigator had been trained to use the CHILDES protocols during his graduate studies at the Pennsylvania State University, at the occasion of a course on first language acquisition taught by Prof. Justine Cassell. The accuracy of the orthographic transcription was carefully checked multiple times by the investigator himself.

In 2009, a separate %mor tier including a word by word morphological decomposition of learners’ speech, pruned of fillers and retracing, was included. The task was performed using the French grammar contributed by Christophe Parisse, available from the CHILDES site at the time, and subsequently went through extensive disambiguation and verification by the investigator. The morphological decomposition on a separate %mor tier has been added only for learners' utterances, and not the investigator's utterances. A %mor tier for the utterances produced by the investigator is in preparation.

In 2010, the accuracy of transcriptions was independently verified by two research assistants at UNSW, Sydney, thanks to a research grant from the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

In 2016, each utterance from the orthographic transcriptions has been linked to the corresponding segment in the audio files, and disfluency encoding has been revised.

In 2017, the transcription files of the interviews that took place in October 2004 have been separated by task (discussion, story retelling, role playing, interrogative elicitation task) (see below).

Pseudonyms

After each interview, participants were asked to sign a participation consent form allowing the use of the data for research purposes and guaranteeing anonymity. After the recordings were completed in 2005, participants were asked to complete the Talkbank informed consent allowing for the dissemination of the corpus via Talkbank. Nine participants gave their authorisation. A tenth student who participated to the whole length of the project is not included in the Talkbank repository, as that participant was not available to sign the Talkbank consent form.

To preserve the anonymity of the participants, pseudonyms were used throughout in the transcription of the conversations: ‘Loc’ (for Locuteur 'speaker' in French) followed by two digits: Loc08, Loc12, Loc14, Loc16, Loc17, Loc18, Loc20, Loc33, and Loc38, and the names erased from the audio recordings. Additionally, all sensitive information that might be used to identify the participants (name, school attended, place of work, etc.) has been replaced by a generic label in the transcriptions (ex.: Name_of_School, Place_of_Work, etc.) and erased from the audio files. (Whole segments of) conversations may have been removed when topics were too sensitive or too personal (especially religious, political opinions, etc.).

Participants

The participants, eight women and one man, were all early bilingual native speakers of Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole. The latter is the vernacular language spoken at home and in informal situations in Jamaica, and constitutes a strong marker of Jamaican identity. The former is the language acquired at school (and/or at home) and used in more formal situation. All participants in the study were proficient users of standard Jamaican English, acquired throughout their studies leading up to the University level.

All these students learned French as a foreign language in an instructed context. There was little access to the French language outside of the classroom, apart from occasional events organised by the French embassy or the Alliance Française (such as the French film festival). All were University level students enrolled at UWI, Mona, taking French language courses as part of their studies (either as a Major or a Minor). At UWI, the French language programme consisted of 156 hours of language instruction per academic year (78 hours per semester) for the three-year duration of the B.A. The students would concurrently enrol in French culture and literature courses taught in English (with texts in French).

To better evaluate the longitudinal acquisition of French in an instructional setting, all participants retained for the project were students who contributed data during the whole length of the project, did not study French in immersion in a French speaking country and did not spend an extensive time in a French speaking country. Only one of these students, Loc17, spent a week holidaying in a French speaking country at the time of the interviews.

The sample of participants is slightly biased towards the top ability / highly motivated students, as they are the ones who continued successfully without interruption for the whole length of the three-year language program. The earliest data available in Talkbank has been collected at the end of the first semester of the second year of the language programme at UWI (coded as 21), that is, after 220 hours of instruction at the B.A. level and the latest data available in Talkbank has been collected at the end of the first semester of the third year of the language programme (coded as 31), that is, after 350 hours of instruction at the university level.

Furthermore, the participants had varied background in language learning before joining the French language programme at the BA level. To determine their previous language background, all were asked to complete a socio-biographical questionnaire. Three types of participants can be distinguished: • Three learners, Loc17, Loc18 and Loc38, completed the secondary certification of the Caribbean Examination Council (C-SEC): normally a total of 150-200 hours of instruction over four years at the secondary level; • Two learners, Loc14, Loc20, further completed the advanced certification of the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE), or the equivalent GCE A level of Cambridge: normally 300 additional hours of instruction over two years; • Four learners, Loc08, Loc12, Loc16 and Loc33, completed intensive beginner's programs in French either at UWI (250 hours in a year), or in private language institutes in Kingston (such as the Alliance Française de Kingston). Additionally, Loc08 and Loc12 completed the first year of the language program during an intensive 6-week summer programme at UWI (in July 2003).

Even though they had varied levels of proficiency and different educational background in French as a foreign language, the students had been placed at the same level in the French language programme at the B.A. level because of University regulations. The nine learners can also be distinguished by their exposure to Spanish: For Loc08, Loc12, Loc16, Loc33, and Loc38, Spanish was the first foreign language learned at school, and for L20, a language learned alongside French. Loc17 and Loc18 had received no exposure to Spanish and Loc14 only one semester exposure at school. Finally, Loc38 also followed an introductory level course in Japanese at UWI for one semester.

Situational Description

The 25 interviews took place from the first semester of the second year (coded as level 21) in November 2003 to the first semester of the third year (coded as level 31) in October 2004 of the French language program.

All interviews took place in the office of the investigator (room 47B, New Arts Building), on the UWI, Mona Campus. The investigator and the participant were sitting in front of each other with the recorder in between. There was often loud noise in the background (conversation, traffic, thunder, etc.).

Interviews were recorded using a minidisk recorder (Sharp Portable Mini disk recorder MD-MT290H) with a stereo condenser microphone, and subsequently transferred to electronic formats (WMA, WAV, MP3).

The activities completed during the interviews were designed to elicit various morpho-syntactic features. The investigator tried to maintain an informal relaxed atmosphere that contrasted with the more formal interviews that happened during oral exams. Included in the Talkbank repository are:

• Conv: Description of a celebrity chosen by the student (five minutes preparation time), followed by an impromptu informal follow-up conversation, at level II1;
• Story: Comic strip story retelling task at levels II2 and III1: participants were given a couple of minutes of preparation time to observe a short comic strip created by the investigator, and retell the story in their own words (this task elicited narrative structures and verbs of movement); the same story was used in both occasions;
• Disc: Impromptu semi-guided conversation at level III1 during which the investigator explored similar topics with each participant such as recent events (hurricane Yvan that had recently hit Jamaica), studies, holidays or leisure activities, and/or plans;
• Inter: Interrogative elicitation task at level III1: questions are asked by participants to the investigator to guess the identity of a celebrity, chosen from a booklet of pictures of famous personalities (in the fields of politics, music, sport, and cinema) compiled by the investigator (this task elicited interrogative structures); students were given a couple of minutes preparation time to look at the booklet of pictures before asking the questions to the investigator;
• Role: Role play at level III1: participants were asked to assume a different persona linked with a current social issue in Jamaica (street children) and speak of his/her experiences under this assumed personality (this task induced free flow speech with little intervention from the investigator, and elicited verbs in the first person and negative sentences); there was no preparation time for this activity.

For the Talkbank repository, the transcription files of the activities that took place at level III1 in October 2004, during a 20-25-minute interview per participant, have been separated in different files according to tasks: informal discussion, comic strip story retelling, interrogative elicitation task and role play.

Here is the list of activities available for each student:

Date	Activity	L08	L12	L14	L16	L17	L18	L20	L33	L38
Nov 2003	Conv	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+
Apr 2004	Story	+	+	-	+	+	-	+	+	+
Oct 2004	Disc	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+
Oct 2004	Inter	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+
Oct 2004	Role	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	-
Oct 2004	Story	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+

Some activities are missing either because of technical difficulties during the recording session, or because the student did not complete the activity. The explanations of tasks by the investigator and transitional conversations in between activities are not included in the Talkbank database. An additional activity supposed to elicit negative sentences is not included, as it did not produce the expected result for several students.

The names of the “cha” transcription files (as well as of the corresponding audio files) are coded in the following way: the first two digits indicate the individual code of each participant (08, 12, etc.), the next two digits indicate the year of study (2, 3) followed by the semester (1, 2) of study during which the recording took place, and finally, after an underscore, an indication of the situation of the interview (see labels above) is mentioned: The file 0831_Role.cha for instance, contains the transcription of participant Loc08, completing the role playing activity, during the first semester of the third year of the BA. Each file is linked with an .mp3 audio file of the same name.

Transcription conventions

• Filled pauses have been transcribed using the French orthography as &-euh and &-hum respectively, even though they are sometimes not pronounced in the French way.
• The version of the French %mor grammar used is the 2009 one.
• Clicks of the tongue are transcribed as 0 [=! click] on the main tier.
• Only errors relating to the production of non-French words, serious mispronunciation mistakes, or word category mismatches have been explicitly indicated with [*] in the transcriptions, and explained on a separate %err tier.
• Some French phrases are encoded as linkages: basket_ball (basketball), mi_temps (part time), parce_que (because), en_ce_qui_concerne (as far as… is concerned), à_cause (thanks (to)), il_y_a (ago), à_travers (through), comme_ci_comme_ça (so so), un_peu (a bit), un_petit_peu (a little bit), peut_être (maybe), au_dedans (inside), au_dessus (above), tout_le_monde (everybody), au_revoir (goodbye), etc.
• Incorrect liaisons and non-obligatory liaisons produced by students are mentioned in a %com tier.
• When a student repeats a word that has just been corrected by the investigator, it is conventionally indicated as a quote on the main tier, and if the student has not used the word before, it is encoded as 'quote' on the %mor tier as well.
• Main clauses starting with the conventional conversational continuer 'et' (and) are systematically placed on a new line, as in the following example:

Acknowledgments