LEONIDE is a longitudinal corpus of student essays documenting the language competences and writing development of lower secondary school students in three different languages.
The corpus contains 2.512 texts from 163 pupils, who participated in the project “One school, many languages” conducted in eight schools in the officially multilingual Italian province of South Tyrol / Alto Adige (Zanasi & Stopfner, 2018). The aim of the project was to document the development of the pupils' plurilingual linguistic and communicative skills by collecting oral and written language samples in Italian, German and English, in order to obtain a global view of their individual linguistic repertoire.
LEONIDE contains all the texts written by the participating students during the course of the project, the overall size of the corpus amounts to ca. 240.000 tokens. The texts were collected over the span of 3 consecutive years (2015-2018) in public middle schools (i.e. lower secondary school, grade 6 to grade 8). The pupils were 11 years old at the beginning of the data collection and 13 years old at the end. In each grade, two written texts were collected that differ with respect to genre: the first text was elicited using a picture story re-telling task; the second text is an opinion text on different aspects related to the pupils’ life and public discourse. For each genre and each grade, the corpus provides texts in the three languages German, Italian and English. In order to reflect the school system of the Province of South Tyrol / Alto Adige, about half of the texts was collected in four schools in which German is the main language of teaching and Italian is taught as L2. The other half of the texts was collected in four schools in which Italian is the main language of teaching and German is taught as L2. In all schools, English is taught as L3 (i.e. as a foreign language at school). Subdivided by language, the corpus contains 844 Italian, 833 German and 835 English texts.
Manual annotation:
The corpus is fully anonymised and annotated with target hypotheses correcting orthography errors in the text as well as annotations on structural elements (paragraphs, line breaks, bullet points, symbols or emoticons etc.), foreign word insertions and transcript surface features (e.g. deletions, corrections or insertions of the student, unreadable or ambiguous items).
Automatic annotation:
Automatic linguistic annotation included sentence splitting, tokenisation, lemmatisation and part-of-speech-tagging.
Text metadata:
The corpus provides a series of relevant person-related metadata (e.g. age, gender, first language(s), school and possible special needs of the students) as well as task-related metadata (e.g. task year, text genre, etc.)
Usage:
As the corpus documents the development of plurilingual competences of individual learners over a period of three years, it will allow both quantitative research on the characteristics of young learners’ language over a relatively long period, as well as investigations of the development of individuals taking into account a wide range of person related metadata. In addition, it allows contrastive analyses of the young learners’ progress in their L1, L2 and L3.
Availability:
The corpus will be available for corpus queries via an ANNIS search interface and as download for academic purposes (ACA-BY-NC-NORED 1.0) on the Eurac Research Clarin Centre by the end of 2020.
References:
Zanasi, L. & Stopfner, M. (2018). Rilevare, osservare, consultare. Metodi e strumenti per l’analisi del plurilinguismo nella scuola secondaria di primo grado. In C. M. Coonan, A. Bier Ada & E. Ballarin (Ed.), La didattica delle lingue nel nuovo millennio. Le sfide dell’internazionalizzazione (pp. 135-148). Edizioni Ca’Foscari. http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-227-7/009
Glaznieks, A., Frey, J.-C., Stopfner, M., Zanasi, L. & Nicolas, L. (accepted): LEONIDE: A longitudinal trilingual corpus of young learners of Italian, German and English. In: International Journal of Learner Corpus Linguistics.
