1. A learner corpus of students’ examination work in English language (a project) Sylwia Twardo Centre for Foreign Language Teaching, Warsaw University, Poland smtwardo@uw.edu.pl

2. Introduction The Centre for Foreign Language Teaching offers blended courses of foreign languages. For a variety of reasons (e.g., the copyright law) the materials for the courses must be made by the authors. A learner corpus is one of the sources the authors may draw when preparing teaching materials. The Centre also takes part in running final exams for the University students, which include a written part. For that reason it seemed feasible to collect the examination works in order to create a learner corpus. At the moment about 10,000 examination papers have been collected. This presentation first sheds some light on the system of teaching and examining students at Warsaw University and then at the project of the corpus including its advantages and shortcomings.

3. Plan of the presentation General background  The system of language teaching at Warsaw University  The University database  The exams About the corpus  Material  Tagging  Size  Applications

4. The system Every student is entitled to 240 teaching hours of a language(s) of their choice There are 60 hours per semester Language courses are provided by the Centre for Foreign Language Teaching, the Faculty of Modern Languages, University Colleges of Language Teacher Education, the Studies of Eastern Europe, and the Centre for Open and Multimedia Education The students have to pass the exam in a foreign language at B2 (CEFR) level. The exam is run jointly by the Faculty of Modern Languages and the Centre for Foreign Language Teaching The students enrol to the courses and to the exams through the Central Token Registration System

5. Information available from the University database Students’ names Students’ age & gender Their first language Possibly the Department at which they study

6. Information which is not available Other languages the students can speak How long they have been studying the foreign language (and whether it is a foreign or second language for them) Whether they really are at the level for which they take the exam

7. The corpus is going to be composed of the The exams (1) The exams are held three times a year Participants: mostly students of Warsaw University Levels: B1, B2, C1

8. The exams (2) Changes in the choice of the exam level: B2 obligatory for all students from 2006/2007 Participation in the exam (English language for the academic year 2006-2007):  B1 – about 1500 students  B2 – about 2000 students  C1 – about 300 students

9. The exams (3) Written by hand No aids (e.g., dictionaries) The whole exam lasts 2 hours Within that time the students can decide how long they are going to focus on the letter/essay part

10. The corpus material (1) The exam consists of various parts including a task in writing  B1 - an informal letter (120 – 150 words)  B2 - an opinion essay (150 – 180 words)  C1 - an opinion essay or a review (180 – 220 words)

11. The corpus material (2) Choice of topic by students  B1 – according to instruction  B2 – connected with a reading comprehension task  C1 – connected with a reading comprehension task or a review The materials have been collected since 2004

12. Markup Student’s date of birth and gender Date and level of the exam (B1, B2, C1) Topic of the written task Grade for the written task (in points) assigned by two teachers Overall grade for the whole exam

13. Tagging Divisions in the text (paragraphs) For B2 and C1 – the reading comprehension texts will be taken into account: parts which are taken verbatim without quotation marks are going to be tagged The spelling mistakes

14. Size and content of the corpus: Initially – one million words Only tasks which are of required length will be taken into account The respective levels (B1, B2, C1) will be represented proportionally to the number of tasks done for each level Tasks by students with Polish as a first language will be chosen

15. Applications of the corpus (1): To make teaching materials both for traditional and blended courses  Corpus based work – to prepare teaching materials (especially for blended courses)  Corpus driven work – diagnostic (for both kinds of courses)

16. Applications (2) For research by students and researchers from Warsaw University  Study of interlanguage  Comparison with other corpora