This project has two parts. Part one is a project initiated by the University of Oregon and funded by a Title VI IRS grant to make data from the over 30,000 students who have taken STAMP proficiency tests in Spanish, Japanese, French, and German available in computer format to SLA researchers. Lourdes Ortega of the NFLRC will join Susan Gass (Michigan State University), Elaine Tarone (University of Minnesota), and Jacquelyn Schachter (University of Oregon) in using these data to ask basic questions about learner profiles that have never been asked before with such large numbers of learners — the data will be contributed to the CHILDES database in the CHAT format.
Part two of the project involves contribution to the CHILDES database of a second large corpus collected under an earlier NFLRC project on syntactic complexity in oral narrative (Japanese, Spanish, German). The goal of the project is to produce an NFLRC technical report that will provide a model for how CHILDES programs and tools can be used on L2 learner corpora to investigate varied research questions, as well as making the four-language syntactic complexity corpus publicly available to the international SLA research community.
Partners: the University of Oregon LRC, also supported by a Title VI IRS grant, in collaboration with the LRCs at Michigan State University and the University of Minnesota.