KANDEL: A developmental corpus of learner German

This article presents the Kansas Developmental Learner corpus (KANDEL), a corpus of L2 German writing samples produced by several cohorts of North American university students over four semesters of instructed language study. This corpus expands the number of freely and publicly available learner corpora while adding to the depth of these corpora with a unique set of features. It does so by focusing on an L2 other than English, German, targeting beginning to intermediate L2 proficiency levels, and including dense developmental data and annotations for multiple linguistic variables, learner errors, and over twenty learner and task variables. Furthermore, this article reports the procedure and results of an inter-annotator agreement study as well as an in-depth analysis of annotator disagreement. In this way, it contributes to best practices of annotating learner corpora by making the annotation process transparent and demonstrating its reliability

New developments in the study of L2 writing complexity: An editorial

A growing number of publications are highlighting the promising interfaces between the traditionally separate research areas of Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Writing (see Manchón & Tardy, 2012). Researchers are pointing out the specific aspects of writing that facilitate L2 development, in particular its slower pace and permanent record (vs. speaking), which are conducive to more learner self-reflection and greater linguistic complexity and precision (Verspoor, Schmid, & Xu, 2012; Williams, 2012). Separately, the burgeoning field of research on L2 complexity has yielded both programmatic studies that have re-examined and re-defined the notion of L2 complexity (Bulté& Housen, 2012; Ortega, 2012; Pallotti, 2015), as well as numerous empirical studies that investigate L2 complexity, often in conjunction with related dimensions of accuracy and fluency (e.g., Connor-Linton & Polio, 2014; Housen & Kuiken, 2009; Housen, Kuiken, & Vedder, 2012). This special issue brings several of these research strands together to focus on second language writing complexity

Syntactic modification at early stages of L2 German writing development: A longitudinal learner corpus study

This study explores ab initio development of syntactic complexity in a longitudinal corpus of learner German writing from a Dynamic Usage-Based perspective. It contributes to the research on L2 writing complexity by focusing on beginning learners of an L2 other than English (German) and on fine-grained measures of syntactic complexity, operationally defined here as syntactic modification. The results show that not only ubiquitous global measures of syntactic complexity but also more specific measures, namely frequencies of syntactic modifiers, can serve as developmental indices at beginning L2 proficiency levels. The learners in this study modified their writing from the very onset of language study and the overall size and range of the modification system did not significantly change over four semesters. However, its composition changed continuously and reflected non-linear waxing and waning of different modifier categories. The study confirmed some results from previous cross-sectional research showing that interlanguage development is characterized by a decrease in cognitively easier (e.g., uninflected) categories and an increase in cognitively more difficult (e.g., inflected and clausal) categories. The high variability that was found along with uniform group trends demonstrates the necessity of simultaneous investigations of linguistic development in groups and individuals

Specific Syntactic Complexity: Developmental Profiling of Individuals Based on an Annotated Learner Corpus

This study tracks the development of syntactic complexity in the writing of two beginning German as a second language learners with English as a first language over four semesters of collegiate language study by using developmental profiling techniques applied to an annotated learner corpus. The focus of the investigation is on individual developmental pathways and differences between learners who follow the same instructional sequences. The study explores variation in terms of frequencies of the selected complexity features (coordinate, nominal, and nonfinite verb structures) using corpus analysis techniques with semi‐automatic corpus annotation. Two developmental profiles emerge from an in‐depth contextual investigation of the target linguistic phenomena. The results show that the general developmental trend is for increasing frequency and range of syntactic complexity features with learners diverging more from one another in the second half of the observation period. This study addresses existing gaps in interlanguage complexity research by focusing on benchmarking development rather than gauging proficiency, addressing specific rather than global complexity measures, and targeting instructed learners at beginning rather than high‐intermediate and advanced proficiency levels. Suggestions for future developmental second language acquisition research and foreign language pedagogy are made

Data-driven learning of collocations: Learner performance, proficiency, and perceptions

This study explores the effects of Data Driven Learning (DDL) of German lexico grammatical constructions (verb preposition collocations) by North American college students with intermediate foreign language proficiency. The study compares the effects of computer based and paper based DDL activities as evidenced in learners’ immediate and delayed performance gains, and explores changes in learners’ proficiency and DDL perceptions as well as the influence of these factors on performance. The results show that both DDL types were equally effective for all learners, independent of their proficiency and perceptions, although gains measured by a more controlled production test (gap-filling) were superior to and longer lasting than gains measured by a less controlled production test (sentence writing). Furthermore, immediate performance gains on different tasks were differently affected by learner proficiency and perceptions, while delayed gains showed no such effects. Finally, the study found that overall learner proficiency increased and that DDL was well received by learners and they expressed an intention to use it for independent learning in the future. This study fills gaps existing in DDL research by focusing on a second language other than English, comparing different DDL types, measuring delayed learning gains, and combining different outcomes measures in a multilevel modeling design

The effectiveness of written corrective feedback in teaching beginning German

©Wiley/Blackwell Publishing 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Wiley/Blackwell Publishing for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Foreign Language Annals volume 43, no. 4, pp. 671-689. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2010.01108.x.Erratum: the data for Table 1 (p. 678) were erroneously pasted as the data for Table 2 (p. 679) and vice versa.This study explores the effectiveness of instructor-written corrective feedback for the improvement of writing accuracy by beginning college-level learners of German. The researcher investigated changes in error rates in six error categories in essay writing in correlation with three different corrective feedback types administered consistently throughout one semester: direct, coded, and uncoded feedback. The author analyzed both short-term revision effects and semester-long changes. The study found that all groups improved their accuracy in redrafting; participants did not shorten the essay length in the final drafts to eliminate errors; direct correction led to slightly higher correction rates for selected errors; and there was no significant difference in overall error rate changes between the groups. The study concludes with suggestions for further research and pedagogical applications.University of Kansas General Research Fund allocations Nos. 2302139 and 2301356

Discovery learning and teaching with electronic corpora in an advanced German grammar course

This study describes the design and implementation of a usage‐based and corpus‐based advanced German grammar course. Teaching materials for the course included DWDS, or Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache: a large, representative, free and publicly available corpus of contemporary German texts. The article outlines specific theoretically informed principles for course design and presents a logical progression of corpus‐based grammar‐teaching activities as used in this course. It also reports participants’ post‐course reactions which were very positive. The article contains practical recommendations for educators interested in trying out corpus‐based activities for teaching German grammar at different proficiency levels as well as to different participant groups. Furthermore, it promotes a more holistic perspective toward grammar as a meaning‐making resource compatible with innovative approaches to grammar pedagogy