Publications Reference
Researchers using this database are asked to acknowledge both the owner(s) of the corpora they are using and the FLLOC projects (Myles & Mitchell, http://www.flloc.soton.ac.uk/) in any publication arising from their work. They are also asked to acknowledge the CHILDES project as outlined at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/.

Project description

What is the project about?

This website is the outcome of a series of research projects funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) award numbers R000223421, RES000220070, RES-062-23-1545, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) RE-AN9057/APN-15456, AR112118 and the British Academy SG 41141, SG-51728 since 2001, at the University of Southampton and Newcastle University, in the UK.

Our long term goal is to promote research relating to the acquisition of French as a second/foreign language, by providing access to a growing database of French Learner Language Oral Corpora. Some corpora available through the site were collected by the Southampton-Newcastle team and others have been donated by other French L2 researchers whose contribution is gratefully acknowledged.

The contents of the database are being made freely available to the research community, in the form of digital sound files and related transcripts formatted using CHILDES software. The FLLOC research team has adapted the CHILDES software to deal with SLA specific issues (see additional conventions) and has modified and developed the French morphosyntactic tagger (MOR) over the course of the projects. A search facility is also provided which enables researchers to select the sound files and transcripts they wish to download from the site. The database currently contains over 4000 files (sound files, transcripts and morphosyntactically tagged transcripts).

The website also aims to include an inventory of other French interlanguage corpora not available within FLLOC but held by other researchers and institutions.

Contact us
Professor Florence Myles
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ
Email: fmyles@essex.ac.uk
Or
Professor Rosamond Mitchell
Modern Languages
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BJ
Email: R.F.Mitchell@soton.ac.uk

What is our current research about?

Learning French from ages 5, 7 and 11: An investigation into starting ages, rates and routes of learning amongst early foreign language learners (ESRC research award number RES-062-23-1545).

The latest project is funded by a research grant from the ESRC which runs from October 2009 to September 2011. The project has four broad objectives:

To document the development of linguistic competence among young classroom learners of French at three different starting ages, in primary and early secondary school classrooms, and identify similarities and differences;
To compare rates of development at different ages after the same amount of classroom exposure;
To document and compare the classroom learning strategies used by children at different ages and their attitudes to language learning;
Through this evidence, to contribute to theoretical understandings of language learning among young learners, and consequently inform current primary languages initiatives and educational practices in the UK and internationally.

How you can use this website

Each corpus included in the FLLOC database is accompanied by a project description. This includes: details of the corpus owners and the learners; information about the tasks used; an explanation of any distinctive transcription conventions used; an explanation of transcript headers (which enable searches to be carried out on the database); a summary of the files contained in the database, and of the organising principles used for each dataset.

First Time Users

A Beginners Guide is available to help first time users with the installation of the CHILDES, and the browsing of our datasets.