At Trinity we are wildly excited – yes, wildly – to finally have our corpus project set up with CASS. It’s a unique opportunity to create a learner corpus of English based on some fairly free flowing L2 language which is not too constrained by the testing context. All Trinity oral tests are recorded and most of the tests include one or two tasks where the candidate has free rein to talk about their own interests in their own way – very much their own contributions, expressed as themselves. We have been hoping to use what is referred to as our ‘gold dust’ for research that will be meaningful – not just to the corpus community but also in terms of the impact on our tests and our feedback to learners and teachers. Working with CASS has now given us this golden opportunity.
The project is now up and running and in the corpus building stage and we have moved from the heady excitement of imaging what we could do with all the data to the grindstone of pulling together all the strands of meta data needed to make the corpus robust and useful. The challenges are real – for example, we need to log first languages but how do we ensure reliability? Meta data is now an opt-in in most countries so how do we capture everyone? Even when the data boxes are completed how do we know it’s true? No, the only way is the very non-technological method of contacting the students again and following up in person.
A related concern is has the meta data we need shifted? We would normally be interested in what kind of input students had had to their learning so e.g. how many years study etc. In the past, part of this data gathering was to ask about time learners had spent in an English-speaking country. Should this now be shifted to time spent watching videos online in English, in social media, in reading online sources? What is relevant –and also collectable?
The challenges in what might be considered this no-core information is forcing us to re-examine how sure we are about influences on learning – not just our perception but form the learner’s perception as well.