General description of the SPLLOC 1 corpus
The SPLLOC 1 corpus includes extensive samples of spoken Spanish produced by 60 instructed learners with English as their L1.
The learners are all English L1 speakers who have learned L2 Spanish in educational contexts within the UK. Speakers from bilingual English/Spanish backgrounds or with extensive social contacts with Spanish speakers were excluded from the sample. It was not possible to control learner selection for gender as the large majority of L2 learners at college and university levels in the UK are female.
The learners are at 3 different levels:
|L2 Spanish level||Typical age||Approx no hours of Spanish instruction||Educational level (English system)||Approx position on CEF|
|Beginners N = 20||13-14 years||c 180 hours||Lower secondary school (Year 9)||A2|
|Intermediate N = 20||17-18||c 750 hours||Sixth form college (Year 13)||B1-B2|
|Advanced N = 20||21-22||C 895 hours + year abroad||University (Year 4)||C1-C2|
The native speakers
The corpus also includes samples of spoken Spanish produced by native speakers of similar ages to the L2 learners (5 at each age level), performing the same range of tasks.
Depending on their language level, the learners undertook a range of between 5 and 7 tasks. The first group of tasks was designed to explore the learners' oral competence in L2 Spanish in a relatively open ended way. The learners undertook a number of speaking activities either with a member of the research team as interlocutor (narrative tasks, interview and discussion of photographs) or with another learner as interlocutor (discussion task). The second group of activities was designed to explore aspects of learner morphosyntax in more focussed ways (clitic pronouns production task, clitics interpretation task, word order task).
The individual tasks were completed by the following learner groups:
|Individual interview + photos||ALL|
|Loch Ness narrative||ALL|
|Modern Times narrative||Advanced|
|Pair discussion||Intermediate, Advanced|
The native speaker interlocutors
The data was collected on site in schools and colleges by a team of Spanish native speakers who had all received training in data elicitation using the set of tasks.
The audio recordings
Learner speech was audiorecorded using small portable digital voice recorders. The resulting soundfiles are being made available through the website in both .wav and MP3 formats.
WARNING: The quality of the sound files is variable depending on the recording conditions at school and college sites.