Working Group: (Swiss) Learner Corpora and SLA

Introduction

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.

WG Convenors

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

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.

The next meeting will take place on 5 March 2024, 9:15-10:15am, on Zoom. Contact us to get the Zoom link.

Call for contribution Swiss scholars who have learner corpora and datasets and who are interested in participating in this analysis are invited to contact Melissa Juillet (University of Neuchâtel) by end of February 2024.

Join the WG

Are you interested in joining this WG? Write to the CLARIN-CH Coordination Office.