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LINDSEI CD-ROM and handbook

LINDSEI cover

 

Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (CD-ROM + handbook)

Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Sylvie De Cock & Sylviane Granger

Presses universitaires de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, 2010

ISBN: 978-2-87463-245-7

The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) is a corpus of informal interviews with higher intermediate to advanced EFL learners of English from 11 mother tongue backgrounds (Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish and Swedish). It contains over one million words, of which almost 800,000 were produced by learners. This represents 554 interviews, which correspond to more than 130 hours of recording (not included on the CD-ROM). Each interview was made up of three tasks: a warming-up activity, in which learners were given a few minutes to talk about one of three set topics, a free informal discussion which was conceived as the main part of the interview, and a picture description. 

A total of 23 variables have been encoded for each interview, giving information about the learner (L1, age, gender, number of years of English at school, time spent in an English-speaking country, etc), about the interviewer (mother tongue, status in relation to the learner, etc) and about the interview itself (duration, institution where it was recorded, etc).

The search interface allows users to select interviews matching a set of predefined (learner, interviewer and interview) variables.

Fig. 10

It is also possible to select parts of the interview only, corresponding for example to the learner’s turns, the interviewer’s turns, or any of the three tasks making up the interview (set topic, free discussion or picture description).

Fig. 17

Finally, the user has access to statistics about the number of words in the selected corpus and its breakdown according to the different variables encoded.

Fig. 14

Pie chart representations of the statistics are also available.

Fig. 16

The interface was developed by the Centre de Traitement Automatique du Langage (CENTAL) of the University of Louvain.

The program runs on Windows Professional systems NT 4, 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7. Note that the current version of the CD-ROM does not work on Windows 7 64 bits. Please contact us if you experience any difficulties or if you would like to use the program with a different operating system.

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