UEA Corpus
Description
The University of East Anglia (UEA) corpus is a corpus of multi-participant L2 and L1 French and English oppositional talk (i.e. talk in which speakers express opposing views). The corpus represents the communicative behaviour, in comparable oppositional interactions, of undergraduate learners of French and English, all recorded both in their L2 and their L1 and at two different levels for the learners of French. The dataset encompasses:
For French
- L2 French before an extended period of residence in a French speaking country (2 groups, 5 subjects each)
- L2 French after an extended period of residence in a French speaking country (2 groups; 6 and 7 subjects)
- NS French (TL norm) (2 groups, 4 and 5 subjects)
For English
- NS English - learners' native communicative behaviour before time abroad (same two groups as in i))
- NS English - learners' native communicative behaviour after time abroad (same two groups as in ii))
- L2 English (counterpoint to NS English; same 2 groups as in iii))
i.e. 12 recordings in all (25 minutes on average; 5 hours in all; 95,000 words).
The corpus was collected by Marie-Noëlle Guillot between November 2002 and December 2004 in the School of Language, of Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of East Anglia, for a pilot project interested in the demands of oppositional talk on learners of French as a FL and in factors shaping L2 pragmatic development at advanced level.