Working Group: (Swiss) Learner Corpora and SLA

This WG aims at increasing the accessibility and reusability of Swiss Learner Corpora (e.g., French, German and Italian L1 and L2, Rhaeto-Romance, English L2) for Learner Corpora Research and Language teaching.

In Switzerland, there are numerous multimodal corpora which cannot be accessed and reused for various reasons. In this context, this WG has the following objectives:

  • Make an inventory of existing Swiss learner corpora.
  • Make an analysis of the reasons for which these resources are not accessible.
  • Make recommendations about how to render these resources accessible and reusable, such as: (i) error corrections / management of transcription errors, (ii) metadata schema to describe these corpora to increase data findability and reusability, (iii) whenever possible, solving legal and ethical issues about sharing this data as Open Research Data.
  • Produce best practice documentation about how to avoid having resources that cannot be openly shared and reused, such as transcription conventions, anonymisation, consent, etc.

Activities

The WG started in December 2023 with a kick-off meeting, whose purpose was to launch the inventory of existing Swiss learner corpora and datasets. As a follow up step, we will carry out a survey to collected more detailed information about each corpus and dataset identified, which will be useful to understand the reasons for which these resources are not accessible and how to increase their FAIR-ness.

WG Convenors

  • Anita Thomas (UNIFR)
  • Cristina Grisot (CLARIN-CH National Coordinator)
  • Mélissa Juillet (UNINE)

Join the WG

Are you interested in joining this WG? Write to the CLARIN-CH Coordination Office or get in touch with us using the contact form.

Workshop on the results of the learner corpora survey

The working group is pleased to announce that on Friday, 21 November 2025, a workshop will be held at the University of Fribourg.

The workshop will focus on presenting and discussing the results of the learner corpora surveyThe aim of the survey was to identify existing learner corpora in Switzerland, determine which are publicly accessible, understand their barriers and explore ways to facilitate their availability.

The workshop will feature contributions from the members of the working group in the form of presentations.