Newcastle Corpus
Headers used (for searching purposes)
It is important to understand how the headers work in the CHILDES system, as they contain the labels which will enable the computer to recognise files and therefore to search the corpora for individual files or batches of files.
Each file has to have a number of descriptive "headers", as described below, and always introduced by the @ symbol:
@Languages: fr
This is the main language of the transcript. fr stands for French.
@Participants: L21 Subject, ANA Investigator
L21 is the code for the learner: 21 is the student number and L is the code for task (in this case, L is the Loch Ness task). ANA is the code for the researcher.
Task codes:
- L = Loch Ness
- I = Interrogatives
- N = Negatives and adverbs
- P = Photos task
- D = Discussion task (in pairs)
- T = Temps Modernes
Identification - each file has (at least) two IDs, as follows:
@ID: fr|ncl|N15|15;3.2|male|AS||Subject|A*|
This is the ID for the learner.
language; corpus; learner/task code; age; gender; school year, role, GCSE grade for French;
fr stands for French, the language of the corpus; ncl is the corpus, N15 is the task followed by the number allocated to the learner, this student is 15 years, 3 months and 2 days old on the day the task was carried out, he is male, he is at AS level (i.e. year 12) and scored A* at GCSE exams.
@ID: fr|ncl|ANA||female|||Investigator||
This is the ID for the researcher.
language; corpus; code for investigator; gender; role
@Date: 01-NOV-2005
This is the date when the recording was made.
@Education of T21: German 4 years, Spanish 2 years.
This header describes what other language(s) the learner might know and how long they have been learning it for.
@Location: DJ.
This is the school's identification.
@Warning: student has lived for 2 years in France.
We use this header for any other information we know about the student that is important to his or her learning of French.
@Situation: Story retelling based on a picture book about a family staying by the Loch Ness.
This is a short description of what the task is about.
@Coder: AD
This is the 2-letter code for the transcriber of this particular file.