Didactic partnership: Centres de Formation Professionnelle de l'Etat de Fribourg (CD-CFP)
The aim of the DiCoi project is on the one hand to produce teaching material from recordings of authentic conversations (spoken language corpora) and on the other hand to describe the longitudinal development of interaction skills (over 2 years) from recordings of free interactions.
Spoken language corpora can be used as a resource for foreign language teaching with the aim of providing exposure to the authentically produced but contextualised target language.
In contrast, data from learner corpora can be used to study the learners’ linguistic development over time. Most of learner corpora available today are transversal (one single measurement per learner) and the data produced by the learners are often ‘tasks’ as is the case for the SWIKO corpus. The DiCoi project intends to contribute to the development of the SWIKO corpus by adding longitudinal data comprising recordings of natural interactions from French L2 learners. These data will be collected during a two-year classroom intervention involving students taking a vocational training course at secondary level.
Both types of corpora will be the focus of the DiCoi project in order to answer the following research questions:
- How can existing interaction corpora be used as a digital teaching resource in the language classroom?
- Does the use of interaction corpora in teaching improve interactive skills in learners of French as a foreign language? At what level of interaction?
- What is the learners’ linguistic development on the level of interaction and grammar as observed in a corpus of longitudinal interactions?
The DiCoi project will produce the following main outputs:
- Tested teaching sequences ready for use by teachers as well as inputs and exercises that can be used independently by learners (Link to teaching sequences);
- A longitudinal corpus of learner interaction, from an under-represented group of learners in instructed second language research.