Overview

This project set out to collect, annotate, and analyze a longitudinal corpus of university students’ writing in German as a Foreign Language at low proficiency levels. This project contributes to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research by facilitating analyses of longitudinal language development both in groups and individuals, whereas most of SLA studies have been either cross-sectional or small-scale longitudinal (tracking 1-2 participants over time). Moreover, this project is novel because the corpus data have been collected: 1) from beginning learners of German (as opposed to the majority of studies focusing on intermediate to advanced proficiency levels); 2) from learners with a homogenous native language background (overwhelmingly American English); 3) from learners with an equal type and amount of exposure to the target language (mostly restricted to the classroom and instructional materials); 4) at dense time intervals (3-5 weeks); 5) in response to real-life classroom instruction tasks; and 6) with multiple types of task and learner metadata.

Access to the corpus

The corpus data are freely available and may be downloaded as well as queried via ANNIS. For further information on the corpora of the Falko family, please consult the Falko web page. To query KanDeL in ANNIS, please refer directly to the ANNIS search interface.