ALERT
Acquiring language efficiently: Research and
teaching
Context
This corpus, collected for a research project led by Laura Collins
(Springer & Collins, 2008), consists of teacher talk addressed
to a class of 20 high-intermediate and advanced ESL students recruited
through a community centre in Montreal. The students were placed in
the course on the basis of an integrated skills test administered
by the centre. They were all recent immigrants to Canada; first languages
in the group were Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, Spanish, Rumanian,
and Russian. Many of the students also knew French. The teacher was
a native speaker of English and a graduate student in Applied Linguistics
with training in communicative language teaching; she had spent 7
years teaching English in Canada and abroad. The classes, which focused
mainly on developing speaking skills through communicative activities,
were about 2 hours long and met twice a week for 9 weeks in the spring
of 2003. The speaking and listening activities were adapted from the
Canadian Concepts, Level 5 textbook and supplemented with group activities
designed by the teacher to give additional opportunities for conversational
interaction (see Springer & Collins, 2008, for details). The corpus
includes 32 hours of class time in total and contains all of the natural
speech produced by the teacher during the 18 classes; it also includes
some scripted speech: a song, some lines of textbook read aloud, and
a dictation.
Description
Since one of the purposes of the research for which the corpus was
originally created was to examine native speaker input, native speech
from other sources was included as well. This additional material
consists of a few remarks made by research assistants and four audio-taped
listening passages. The corpus does not include student productions
even though some of their talk was transcribed.
Format
The entire corpus including all 18 days of teaching as a single text
file or 18 text files, one for each of the teaching days as text files.