Cover not available
Part of
Beyond Concordance Lines: Corpora in language education
Edited by Pascual Pérez-Paredes and Geraldine Mark
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 102] 2021
► pp. 231–252

Chapter 10
CEFR-J × 28

Corpus-based multilingual pedagogical resources and e-learning systems for 28 languages

| Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

This chapter discusses the development of multilingual pedagogical resources that make use of functional descriptors such as vocabulary and grammar items aligned to the CEFR levels in English. CEFR-J × 28 is a project that sets out to create multilingual pedagogical resources for 28 languages based upon the resources developed for the CEFR-J, a localised version of the CEFR for English language teaching in Japan. The chapter discusses the original CEFR-J project and its accompanying resources such as word/phrase lists, grammar and text profiles. It describes how to convert English resources into multiple languages using machine translation and multilingual corpora. A discussion of the advantages of this approach as well as future work is provided. The chapter discusses a series of e-learning tools developed to support learners’ vocabulary and grammar learning as well as a web-based learner corpus collection tool for multilingual spoken and written production.

Keywords: CEFR, multilingual resource development, corpus-based inventory making, foreign language syllabus design
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The CEFR-J project
    • Survey of standards and learning objectives (2004–2007)
    • The construction of the CEFR-J (2008–2011)
    • Reference level descriptions for the CEFR-J (2012–2015)
      • CEFR-J wordlist
      • CEFR-J can-do descriptor database
      • CEFR-J grammar profile
      • CEFR-J text profile
  • Applying the CEFR-J resources to multilingual education
    • Designing a workbench for multilingual pedagogical resource construction
    • Semi-automated construction of the CEFR-J × 28 wordlists
    • Creating can-do phrase lists for the CEFR-J × 28
  • Developing CEFR-J × 28 e-learning tools
    • The CEFR-J × 28 flash card vocab builder
    • The CEFR-J × 28 can-do sentence builder
    • The can-do task-based spoken/written corpus collection tool
  • Conclusions and implications for future research
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 22 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.102.10ton
References
Capel, A.
(2010) A1–B2 vocabulary: Insights and issues arising from the English Profile Wordlists project. English Profile Journal, 1. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Council of Europe
(2020) Common European Framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment companion volume. Council of Europe.Google Scholar
Devlin, J., Chang, M-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K.
(2019) BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of NAACL. Retrieved from arXiv:1810.04805Google Scholar
DuBay, W. H.
(2004) The principles of readability. Impact Information.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J., & Buttery, P.
(2010) Criterial features in learner corpora: Theory and illustrations. English Profile Journal, 1. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Howatt, A. P. R.
(2004) A history of English language teaching. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ishii, Y.
(2016, March 5). Grammatical items for creating the CEFR-J Grammar Profile. Paper presented at the Symposium on the CEFR-J RLD Project: Developing Grammar, Text and Error Profiles Using Textbook & Learner Corpora. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Ishii, Y., & Tono, Y.
(2016, March 5). CEFR-J Grammar Profile no tame no bunpo koumoku hindo-chosa. (A frequency analysis of grammar categories for the CEFR-J Grammar Profile). Paper presented at the Symposium on the CEFR-J RLD Project: Developing Grammar, Text and Error Profiles Using Textbook & Learner Corpora. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Izumi, E., Uchimoto, K., & Isahara, H.
(Eds.) (2004) Nippon-jin 1200-nin no eigo speaking corpus [A spoken corpus of 1200 Japanese EFL learners]. ALC Press.Google Scholar
Japan Foundation
(2020) JF nihongo-kyouiku-standard no can-do no ryoteki kensho ni tsuite [A validation report on the Can do list for the JF Standard for Japanese-Language Education]. Retrieved from [URL]
Jong, J. de, Meyor, M., & Hayes, C.
(2016) Developing global scale of English learning objectives aligned to the Common European Framework. Pearson.Google Scholar
Kato, H.
(2019, September 15). On the translation of the CEFR-J Wordlist into Chinese. Paper presented at The CEFR-J x 28 Roundtable Discussion.Google Scholar
Koike, I.
(Ed.) (2008) Basic research into K-16 English language teaching curriculum design in Japan based on SLA research (Unpublished research report). JSPS KAKENHI, Grant No. 16202010.Google Scholar
McDonald, R., Nivre, J., Quirmbach-Brundage, Y., Goldberg, Y., Das, D., Ganchev, K., Hall, K., Petrov, S., Zhang, H., Täckström, O., Bedini, C., Bertomeu, C. N., & Lee, J.
(2013, August). Universal dependency annotation for multilingual parsing. In H. Schuetze, P. Fung, & M. Poesio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 92–97). ACL.Google Scholar
Mizushima, K., Arase, Y., & Uchida, S.
(2016) CEFR junkyo-kyozai ni okeru goi bunpo no tokucho bunseki to level jido bunrui (Lexico-grammatical feature analysis and automatic level classification using CEFR-based teaching materials). Journal of Natural Language Processing 2016, 789–792.Google Scholar
Morishita, M., Suzuki, J., & Nagata, M.
(2020) JParaCrawl: A large scale web-based English-Japanese parallel corpus. In N. Calzolari, F. Béchet, P. Blache, K. Choukri … S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 3603–3609. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar
Naganuma, N., Nagai, N., & O’Dwyer, F.
(2016) Connections to thinking in English: The CEFR-informed EAP textbook series (B1 to B1+). Asahi Press.Google Scholar
Negishi, M., Takada, T., & Tono, Y.
(2013) A progress report on the development of the CEFR-J. In E. D. Galaczi & C. J. Weir (Eds.), Exploring language frameworks, Proceedings of the ALTE Krakow conference, July 2001 (pp. 135–163). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
North, B., Ortega, A., & Sheehan, S.
(2010) The British Council/ EAQUALS Core inventory for general English. British Council.Google Scholar
Petrov, S., Das, D. & McDonald, R.
(2012) A universal Part-of-Speech tagset. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), (pp. 2089–2096.) European Language Resources Association.Google Scholar
Saville, N., & Hawkey, R.
(2010) The English profile programme – The first three years. English Profile Journal, 1. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tono, Y.
(2017) The CEFR-J and its impact on English language teaching in Japan. JACET International Convention Selected Papers, 4, 31–52.Google Scholar
(2019) Coming full circle – From CEFR to CEFR-J and back. CEFR Journal 1, 5–17. [URL]
(Ed.) (2007) Nippon-jin 1-man nin no Eigo Corpus: JEFFL Corpus (A Corpus of 10,000 Secondary School Students’ Written Essays: The Japanese EFL Learner (JEFLL) Corpus). Shogakukan.Google Scholar
(Ed.) (2012) A final report on the construction of K-16 coherent framework of English education in Japan (Unpublished internal report originally in Japanese). JSPS KAKENHI Grant No. 20242011.Google Scholar
(Ed.) (2013) The CEFR-J handbook. Taishukan.Google Scholar
(Ed.) (2016) A final report on the identification of criterial features for the CEFR levels using L2 learner corpora (Unpublished internal report originally in Japanese). JSPS KAKENHI Grant No. 24242017.Google Scholar
Uchida, S.
(2018, March 18). CEFR-J Text Profile no katuyou (How to use the CEFR-J Text Profile). Paper presented at The CEFR-J 2018 Symposium, Seijo University.Google Scholar