The Kolipsi-2 Corpus is a written learner corpus of German and Italian L2 speakers originating from South Tyrol (Italy). It has been developed as a by-product of the KOLIPSI II project, a replication study of the KOLIPSI project on “South-Tyrolean pupils and the second language: a linguistic and socio-psychological investigation” that was conducted 7 years after the original study.
The data collection for this second edition took place in spring 2014 and is based on two standardized tests for written productions, that were aligned with the original tasks for the KOLIPSI study. However, while the first task remained the same for both editions, the second task was slightly adapted. The two tasks consisted of (1) writing an e-mail to a friend retelling a given event at the supermarket based on a picture story (narrative text genre) and (2) writing an e-mail about negative aspects of social-media chats prompted by a letter to the editor in a youth magazine (argumentative text genre). For both tasks a time limit of 25 minutes was fixed and no additional reference material was allowed.
CEFR levels have been assigned to all L2 learner texts, providing a holistic score as well as evaluations of coherence, sociolinguistic appropriateness, lexical accuracy, lexical diversity, grammar and orthography.
Person-related metadata provides information about:
- the writer's language background, including L1(s), the L1(s) of mother and father, and a self-declared language group affiliation as well as the pre-dominant language spoken in the area the writer is residing in
- the writer's results from an additional language test in the L2 (dialang test)
- the writer's competence in the local German dialect (for students with L1 Italian only)
- the writer's age, gender and socio-economic status
- whether the writer lives in an urban or rural environment
- the language, location and type of school the writer attended
- an anonymous identifier for the writer's school class to account for class effects
All texts have been transcribed manually adding transcription annotations that reflect surface features of the text, such as the graphical arrangement, and include error annotation on the orthographic level.
In addition to that, all texts were automatically annotated, adding tokenisation, sentence splitting, POS-tagging and lemmatization using an orthographically corrected target version of the corpus.
Kolipsi-1 L2 belongs to the Kolipsi Corpus Family, a series of related learner corpora collected in South Tyrolean upper secondary schools. The corpora of the Kolipsi Corpus Family contain Italian and German learner texts that were collected in the course of the KOLIPSI project in 2007/2008 (Kolipsi-1) and a follow-up study in 2014/2015 (Kolipsi-2). The aim of both corpus studies was to analyse the second language competences of South-Tyrolean pupils from upper secondary schools (between 16-18 years old), and to contextualize the results of such investigation by commenting on crucial sociolinguistic and psychosocial aspects that influence it. The results of the follow-up study should be compared to the results of the original KOLIPSI project.