Toward Construction of a Corpus of English Learners’ Utterances Annotated with Speaker Proficiency Profiles: Data Collection and Sample Annotation

Abstract

The first author has designed and implemented college English classes emphasizing face-to-face oral interactions within small groups of students in class, presupposing and expecting further cultivation of learners’ ability to learn for themselves, by themselves and among themselves. Previous experiences confirm such expectations, and the authors are currently working on collecting learners’ spoken interactions with high-quality digital audio and video recording devices along with written materials, scores of language proficiency tests and questionnaire responses of those students. In this presentation, we describe the scope and objective of our project, summarize class activities and recording procedures, and then touch on expected transcription procedures and possible tools for annotation. It may be interesting to notice, in passing, how introduction of various recording devices positively affect students’ motivations and performances in their language learning activities.

Parts of materials presented here are described and discussed in [1] and [2] in Japanese.