Design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) Corpus: A longitudinal and multilingual young learner corpus

This article describes the design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) Corpus. The corpus combines several features that are all rare for learner corpora: it is longitudinal, following individual pupils over several years; it has data from young learners from school years 5 to 13 (ages 10–18); it is multilingual, containing learners’ texts in several L3s (French, German and Spanish), L2 English and L1 Norwegian; and it includes teacher comments on a number of the texts. In addition, some of the texts exist in both a first and a second revised version, all tied to a rich set of meta-data. Not only does such a corpus offer new possibilities for research on language acquisition in general; it can also be used to provide valuable insights for teachers, teacher training and policymaking within the national context of Norway. In this article, we describe the design of the TRAWL Corpus and outline its uses and benefits for the research community. We also describe the compilation process in the hope that it may inspire and enable others to build similar corpora for their own national contexts.publishedVersio

Individual variation between translators in the use of clause building and clause reduction

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in translators’ voices as manifested in their writing style. The present study is an investigation of differences in the use of clause building and clause reduction, which has not so far been investigated in any depth with regard to individual variation. The findings show that translators have distinct styles both with respect to how closely they follow the source text and in the structures they prefer when they introduce changes. The study also demonstrates the importance of analysing changes in context, as translators may be forced to perform syntactic changes that are in principle optional because they have made certain choices in other places of the text. Finally, the study emphasizes the advantage of corpora comprising multiple translations of the same source text

Cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of relative clauses by Norwegian learners of English

This paper reports on an exploratory study of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of relative clauses by young Norwegian learners of English, comparing L1 Norwegian and L2 English material from the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) Corpus to L1 English material from the GiG (Growth in Grammar) Corpus. Previous reports of cross-linguistic influence in this domain have usually involved language pairs that have very different relativization strategies. This study investigates whether similarities between relative clause systems may lead to more subtle effects in the choice of relativizer, the type of head nominal, the syntactic function of the relativized item, the extent of relativization from embedded clauses and the use of relative clauses in special constructions such as existentials and clefts. Although the material is limited, the study found traces of the Norwegian system in the learners L2 English, signalling that this is an area worth further investigation. The learners struggled with the choice between who and which, but used that/zero in a very similar way to their L1 English peers. The L2 English group also had slightly higher frequencies of relative clauses belonging to existentials and clefts, and where the relativized item stemmed from a further embedded clause. These results are consistent with a usage-based theory of second language acquisition, where learners are assumed to transfer features of constructions from their L1 when they are similar enough for them to make a cross-linguistic identification

L2 development of -ing clauses: A longitudinal study of Norwegian learners

Although -ing clauses are frequent in English, their acquisition has not received much attention, and there is a lack of longitudinal studies and detailed explorations of cross-linguistic influence. This longitudinal case study of five young Norwegian students reveals a developmental sequence for the syntactic roles of -ing clauses: complements of aspectual verbs > complements of other verbs and prepositions > bare adjuncts and postmodifiers of nouns > subjects. The sequence may arise from a combination of frequencies in the input and grammatical selection. Syntactic restrictions on Norwegian present participle clauses are not mirrored in the acquisition of -ing clauses, indicating that the students do not make an interlingual identification. Cross-linguistic influence is evident mainly in late acquisition and infrequent use of -ing clauses

Design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) Corpus: A longitudinal and multilingual young learner corpus

This article describes the design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) Corpus. The corpus combines several features that are all rare for learner corpora: it is longitudinal, following individual pupils over several years; it has data from young learners from school years 5 to 13 (ages 10–18); it is multilingual, containing learners’ texts in several L3s (French, German and Spanish), L2 English and L1 Norwegian; and it includes teacher comments on a number of the texts. In addition, some of the texts exist in both a first and a second revised version, all tied to a rich set of meta-data. Not only does such a corpus offer new possibilities for research on language acquisition in general; it can also be used to provide valuable insights for teachers, teacher training and policymaking within the national context of Norway. In this article, we describe the design of the TRAWL Corpus and outline its uses and benefits for the research community. We also describe the compilation process in the hope that it may inspire and enable others to build similar corpora for their own national contexts