Researchers Mine 20 Years of Student Language Data to Unlock How Multilingual Learners Acquire Skills
Swedish researchers have digitized and analyzed a unique archive of Italian language learners' speech recordings from 2001–2009, revealing patterns in how multilingual students develop grammar and vocabulary. The work offers insights for language education programs and shows how linguistic background influences learning outcomes—data increasingly valuable as companies expand international workforce training.
Originaltitel: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF INTERITA: REEXPLORING A SWEDISH LEARNER CORPUS OF ITALIAN
<p>This paper presents <em>InterIta</em>, a corpus of oral production data gathered at Stockholm University between 2001 and 2009 from university students of Italian with different levels of proficiency. In the paper, we outline the characteristics of the corpus and some results from studies that have leveraged the transcribed recordings. These are mainly studies concerning lexical, grammatical and interactional aspects of learners’ interlanguage. The corpus and the studies conducted are framed in the context of the acquisitional studies on Italian as a second/foreign language of the early 2000s. <em>Interita</em> has also served for a body of work within the field of L3 acquisition which has taken an interest in the role of multilingual learners’ linguistic background. As an example of ongoing work based on the corpus, we present a longitudinal study on cross-linguistic influence in the development of verb morphology. Subsequently, we discuss the possibilities and limitations of <em>Interita</em> and highlight the need for integrating complementary data types. We finally suggest possible future directions of research based on the corpus which we believe would enrich the field of research devoted to Italian as a second, third or foreign language.</p>