Design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) Corpus: A longitudinal and multilingual young learner corpus

Vocabulary knowledge forms the basis of all the communicative skills and is a core component of language proficiency. In educational contexts in which target language input is limited, the acquisition of new vocabulary can be a challenging task for learners, and lexical development might be slow. This study explored the extent to which 14 upper-secondary students of French as a foreign language (FFL) in Norwegian schools showed signs of increased lexical richness in their written production over a period of approximately six months. The data were taken from the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) corpus, a digital collection of second and foreign-language learner texts. Two aspects of lexical richness were investigated: 1) lexical sophistication was measured using the MultiLingProfiler software for lexical frequency profiling and supplemented by a manual and more detailed analysis of five learners’ texts; 2) lexical diversity was measured using D_Tools v.2.0 and word family counts. The data revealed that although many learners showed signs of using a somewhat more varied vocabulary over time, it is difficult to find proof of productive vocabulary development among beginning learners of FFL within such a limited period. The study suggests that finer-grained measures of analysis could be added to existing automated tools to make these tools more useful for beginner levels.

Section: Data Collection and Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of lexical richness among beginning learners of French as a foreign language

Vold¹

2023

“…The material for the present study comes from two corpora. One is the English part of the TRAWL corpus, representing written English by pupils in Norwegian schools (See Dirdal et al, 2022). Only a small subset of this corpus was used, namely one that contains writing from a single class in lower secondary schools, and which has been annotated for genre.…”

Section: Corpora and Search Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adverb-adjective combinations in young writers’ English (EL1 and EL2)

Hasselgård

2023

The topic of the present study is adverb-adjective combinations in narrative writing by lower secondary school pupils in Norway and the UK. The investigation is based on subsets of the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) and GiG (Growth in Grammar) corpora and thus compares English as a second language with first-language usage (EL2 and EL1). A number of differences were identified between the two writer groups. While adverb-adjective constructions, such as so happy, much better and really bad, were more frequent and widespread in EL2, they showed more variability in EL1 regarding syntax, semantics and lexical choice. In particular, the amplifying function of modifiers was more dominant in EL2 writing at the cost of other modifier functions. There was also a stronger concentration on a few highly frequent intensifiers in the EL2 than in the EL1 material.

“…The texts were compiled as part of the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) corpus (Dirdal et al, 2022). Further, the subcorpus utilized in the present study consists of six L2…”

Section: Data Collection and Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring English Through Virtual Worlds

Dasic¹

2023

This article studies the connection between Norwegian lower secondary pupils’ gaming habits and their essay grades, as well as to offer gamers’ attitudes towards gaming and language learning. Data were collected from 14 Norwegian lower secondary pupils, with a total of 20 (6 from year 8, 14 from year 9) essays. Six of the participants took part of the study both in year 8 and 9. Three methods were used to answer the research questions. First, statistical tests were run in SPSS for Macintosh (v. 25; SPSS Inc, Chicago II, USA) to discover possible differences in grades in correlation to time spent gaming. Following, a qualitative corpus analysis of 12 texts was conducted to see what lies behind the quantitative numbers. Finally, six semi-open interviews were conducted with the aim to elicit the participants’ attitudes towards gaming and language learning with their longitudinal aspects in mind. The results from the quantitative and qualitative corpus analyses revealed that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between the amount of time the participants spent gaming and their English essay grades. The findings from the mixed methods also suggest that large amounts of time spent gaming are beneficial to other aspects of the student’s English proficiency, such as greater self-confidence when speaking English and creativity when writing. In addition, findings concerning the motivation behind gaming suggest that teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Norway should be aware of and implement activities either in the classroom or as homework to enhance some of the students’ motivation for learning English as a second language. Furthermore, some of the informants in the interviews reported a desire for more gaming centered or open school writing tasks, as they believe it would give them a greater opportunity to show knowledge gained by gaming.