UWE Corpus

Jeanine Treffers-Daller Reading University j.c.treffers-daller@reading.ac.uk

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Citation information

Larrañaga, P., Treffers-Daller, J., Tidball, F. & Gil Ortega, M. (2012). L1-transfer in the acquisition of manner and path in Spanish by native speakers of English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 16(1), 117-138.

Tidball, F. & Treffers-Daller, J. (2007). Exploring measures of vocabulary richness in semi-spontaneous speech of native and non-native speakers of French: a quest for the Holy Grail? In H. Daller, J.L. Milton & J. Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Modelling and assessing vocabulary knowledge (pp.133-149). Cambridge: CUP. ISBN: 978-0-521-70327-7.

Tidball, F. & Treffers-Daller, J. (2008). Analysing lexical richness in French learner language: what frequency lists and teacher judgements can tell us about basic and advanced words. Journal of French Language Studies, 18(3), 299-313.

Treffers-Daller, J. & Tidball, F. (2016). Can L2 learners learn new ways to conceptualise events? Evidence from motion event construal among English-speaking learners of French. In P. Gujarro-Fuente, N. Müller & K. Schmitz (Eds.), The acquisition of French in multilingual contexts (pp. 145-184). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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

Project Description

The French data were collected between 2003 and 2008 from undergraduates studying French as part of a Languages Degree at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol –21 level 1 (first year), 20 level 3 (final year) – and a control group of 23 native French speakers, who took an EFL course at UWE. The English data were collected from first year Linguistics students at UWE Bristol and from French learners of English who were visiting UWE to take an EFL course.

The Spanish data were collected from 68 students who were studying Spanish at UWE Bristol. There were three groups: level 1 students (N = 19), level 2 students (N = 19) and level 3 (final year) students (N = 30). The level 3 students had completed a placement of six months in Spain prior to the data collection.

All students undertook the same task under the same conditions: they were asked individually to record their description of two picture stories presented as cartoon strips of six pictures each (Plauen, [1952] 1996]). The picture stories include Erfolglose Anbiederung (rejected offer) and Unbeabsichtigte Helden (accidental heroes) There is no copyright on these anymore.

The data were transcribed and coded in CHAT, lemmatised and analysed using CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). All students also filled in a C-test, which made it possible to obtain independent information about their Spanish, French or English language proficiency.

Data collection and transcription: Jeanine Treffers-Daller (PI), Kate Beeching, Jean-Yves Cousquer, Annie Lewis, Gareth Lewis and John Tidball. Additional project members: Pilar Larrañaga, and Maricarmen Gil Ortega.

More details on the informants, the C-test, the transcription and the lemmatisation are given in the publications cited above.