Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

13.02. Tatsiana Maiko (Milan): Russian Spoken Learner Corpus: Design, compilation, and applications [zoom]

Learner corpus research for Russian as a second language is a relatively new field that has emerged only within the last decade (Kisselev 2023). This presentation will offer a concise overview of existing Russian learner corpora and surveys current corpus-based studies in L2 Russian acquisition. It will introduce an ongoing project aimed at constructing a spoken learner corpus of Russian (RuSLC, Maiko 2023). The corpus consists of both longitudinal and pseudo-longitudinal oral data produced by L1 Italian learners. In the longitudinal part of the project, data collection is conducted twice a year within the same group of students throughout their three/five-year study program. The pseudo-longitudinal subcorpus includes data produced by students across different proficiency levels, from A1 to C1. In addition to learner data, the corpus also includes two reference subcorpora. One subcorpus contains interviews with native speakers of Russian, while the other one consists of interviews with bilingual (Italian-Russian) speakers. The interviews are transcribed following explicit conventions. The database contains audio files, their transcripts, and detailed metadata about the interviewee, the interviewer, and the tasks. This talk will provide an overview of the corpus's design, metadata structure, and its potential applications in the field of language acquisition research.

References:

Kisselev O. 2023. “Russian Learner Corpora Research: State of the Art and Call for Action”. Bakhtiniana Revista de Estudos do Discurso, 18 (1): 8-29.

Maiko T. 2023. “Proekt ustnogo učebnogo korpusa russkogo jazyka”. L’analisi linguistica e letteraria, XXXI (2): 25-38.​