ALERT
Acquiring language efficiently: Research and
teaching
Context
This teacher corpus, collected for a research project led by Laura
Collins (Collins & White, 2011), contains speech produced by three
instructors who teach in intensive ESL programmes in French elementary
schools in Quebec. The learners in the classrooms were French-speaking
learners if English in their sixth year of schooling (11 to 12 year-olds).
The instruction followed a communicative approach with themes such
as food, hobbies and pets. Each of the three teachers was filmed for
an entire day on four occasions over a period of five months; the
12 recorded video sessions represented a total of about 50 hours of
teaching time. The four filming sessions were spaced so that approximately
100 hours of classroom teaching had transpired between each one.
Description
The teacher talk in the corpus is largely natural classroom speech
but it also contains small amounts of scripted aural input that the
learners were exposed to such as stories, tongue twisters and songs.
It does not contain speech produced by the learners. Student names
in the transcriptions are represented by capital letters. Items such
as uh, eh and sshhh! were not removed. A few French also words occur.
The entire corpus is about 104,000 running words in length.
Format
The entire corpus including all three teachers at all four times as
a single text file or 12 text files, one for each of the three teachers
on each four times as text files.