Brussels Corpus
Description
This corpus was collected by a team of researchers at the Free University of Brussels, led by Professor Alex Housen.
In their study, they investigated the simultaneous learning of two foreign languages
(French and English) in an educational context (secondary education in the
Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, Belgium).
The objective of the study was to evaluate the linguistic and socio-psychological
outcomes of the teaching-learning process in both target languages at the
end of secondary education and to examine the contribution of curricular and
extra-curricular factors to these outcomes.
To this end, some 150 Dutch-speaking Flemish students from different schools
were tested for their proficiency (speaking, reading, writing, reading proficiency
and metalinguistic knowledge) in both target languages as well as for their
attitudinal-motivational disposition towards the two languages. Despite the
fact that French is one of the official languages of Belgium, and despite
the fact that the pupils have more classroom contact with French than with
English, the overall results indicate higher levels of proficiency in English
than in French, and a more favourable disposition towards English than towards
French, pointing to the dominance of extra-curricular factors (e.g. socio-cultural
context, additional input via the media) over curricular factors (amount and
type of instruction and classroom contact). A breakdown of the scores on the
various test components, however, suggests a more intricate interplay between
both types of factors as determinants of foreign language proficiency and
socio-psychological orientation in an educational context.
Only the Frog Story narration is included in the FLLOC database. For details of the other tasks, please contact Alex Housen (ahousenATvub.ac.be).