Corpora: Interlanguage Corpora

[John Milton]

I did it here in Hong Kong by collecting students' school-leaving regional
examination scripts (graded according to standardizing procedures), as
well as the written assignments of the same students submitted to
undergraduate EFL courses and subsequently graded. In both cases, texts
are recoverable by this measure of proficiency (IDs assigned to each
file name are keyed to a database of grades and other info about the
students). I determined that there is significant correlation between the
grades assigned to the exam scripts and to the out-of-class written
assignments: i.e., the grades in both cases indicate a generally agreed
level of proficiency. For the last few years, students have been required
to email a copy of their assignments: each year I get at least a couple of
essays from about 2000 students. I am currently looking at differences
between these proficiency levels in the distribution of lexical strings
and syntactic features, as well as differences in the number and types of
overt lexical and grammatical errors.

- John Milton

On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, T Murphy wrote:

>
> I'm curious if there has been much work done on methods for discriminating
> among levels of interlanguage development when setting up second language
> corpora.
>
> Dr. Terry Murphy
> Dept. of English Language and Literature
> Yonsei University
> Seoul Korea
>
>
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