Reading Corpus
Learners
Reading Corpus 1 French L2
These were 34 secondary school students, aged 16, who had been learning French
for five years, receiving four 35-minute lessons a week. They were all entered
for Higher Level. Their proficiency varied from those who made very little
contribution to conversation to one student who performed at a level comparable
with native speakers. An indication of the huge variation between the students
is given by the standard deviation (166.5 for a mean of 183.6 words) for the
number of words they produced during the interview, which ranged from 35 –
808.
Reading corpus II Native Speakers
These were 26 fifteen-year-old French students. They were all native speakers of French except for one Vietnamese student who had learnt French as a second language.