Constructing a database of French interlanguage oral corpora

There is an increasingly recognised need for datasets of oral production in the second language acquisition research community. This requirement arises in response to two complementary agendas: to advance the second language acquisition research agenda and also for educational reasons. At the University of Southampton, a series of projects have concentrated on the collection of learner oral production data in French. In the mid 1990s the ‘Progression in Foreign Language Learning’ project collected data from Key Stage 3 classroom learners (Mitchell and Dickson 1997 R000234754). In 2001 –2, the Linguistic Development in Classroom Learners of French’ project collected similar data from Key Stage 4 learners (directed by Florence Myles 2001 R000223421). In 2002-3 further projects are running which are archiving these datasets in a standard format, and also collecting and archiving other existing datasets for more advanced learners