BOOK OF ABSTRACTS - EUROSLA

y learners from a wide range of language backgrounds. Examples of L2
oral corpora include the French L2 projects InterFra
(http://www.fraita.su.se/interfra/), based at the University of Stockholm,
FLLOC (http://www.flloc.soton.ac.uk) at the Universities of Southampton
and Newcastle/Essex, and a similar corpus for L2 learner Spanish
(www.splloc.soton.ac.uk), based at the universities of Southampton,
Newcastle/Essex and York. Further publicly accessible examples of oral
corpora for both L2 English and L2 French are available on the Talkbank
project website at http://talkbank.org/data/SLA. Researchers associated with
Talkbank, FLLOC and SPLLOC are making use of CHILDES conventions
and analysis software developed initially for L1 acquisition research to
support their research programmes (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu); others are
developing dedicated tools to analyse morphosyntactic and/ or lexical
characteristics of L2 corpora (Granfeldt et al 2006; Malvern & Richards
2002).The first part of the talk will briefly review these corpora and their
design features.
In spite of this increase in the range of corpora available, however, second
language researchers have been rather slow in taking advantage of them and
their associated computerised methodologies. The second part of the talk
will argue the theoretical and empirical case for the need for SLA research
methodologies to move into the digital age. It will then outline the
possibilities offered by such tools for addressing varied research agendas,
illustrating from the web-based databases of French and Spanish Learner
Language Oral Corpora (FLLOC and SPLLOC; Mitchell et al. 2008; Myles
2007a, 2007b), containing over 3 million words (transcripts, soundfiles,
tagged transcripts) from learners at different levels (www.flloc.soton.ac.uk;
www.spploc.soton.ac.uk). The CHILDES suite of software tools used in
these database for storing, transcribing and analysing the data will be
presented, as well as some of the adaptations made to it for SLA-specific
research purposes. The automatic morphosyntactic tagger will then be
demonstrated, as well as searches carried out directly on the morphosyntactic
output on large batches of files, in order to address specific research
questions.
The last part of the talk will outline how substantive programmes of
research on L2 oral and written corpora are contributing to a range of SLA
issues, from the overall modelling of stages in learner development (e.g.
Bartning & Schlyter 2004) to learner profiling (Granfeldt et al 2006) as well
as to research on L2 morphosyntactic development (e.g. Arche &
Dominguez 2011; Dominguez et al 2011; Myles 2005; Rule & Marsden
2006), on formulaic language (e.g. Meunier & Granger 2008; Myles 2004),
and on L2 pragmatic development (e.g. Belz & Kinginger 2003; Granget
2003; Guillot 2009). The talk will conclude with a discussion of a possible
agenda for the further development of corpus-based research in SLA, paying
particular attention to issues of design principles, software availability and
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