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Article published In:
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research
Vol. 2:1 (2016) ► pp.101–119

The Kansas Developmental Learner corpus (KANDEL)

A developmental corpus of learner German

| The University of Kansas

This article presents the Kansas Developmental Learner corpus (KANDEL), a corpus of L2 German writing samples produced by several cohorts of North American university students over four semesters of instructed language study. This corpus expands the number of freely and publicly available learner corpora while adding to the depth of these corpora with a unique set of features. It does so by focusing on an L2 other than English, German, targeting beginning to intermediate L2 proficiency levels, and including dense developmental data and annotations for multiple linguistic variables, learner errors, and over twenty learner and task variables. Furthermore, this article reports the procedure and results of an inter-annotator agreement study as well as an in-depth analysis of annotator disagreement. In this way, it contributes to best practices of annotating learner corpora by making the annotation process transparent and demonstrating its reliability.

Keywords: beginning and intermediate L2 proficiency, inter-annotator agreement, error annotation, longitudinal learner corpus, L2 German, written corpus
Published online: 19 July 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.2.1.04vya
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