Paper short abstract:

The Japanese as a Foreign Language Corpus (JFLCorp), featuring L1 Spanish, is presented. The design criteria will be introduced, as well as the data collection method and data management. Preliminary data will be reported and a demonstration will be done of the open-access search engine to be used.

Paper long abstract:

The development of second/foreign language (L2/FL) learner corpora has gained momentum in the last two decades. These corpora are nowadays essential in second language acquisition research (Granger et al., 2015; Tracy-Ventura & Paquot, 2020) and the development of teaching/learning resources (Granger, 2017; Hawkins & Filipovic, 2012). However, most learner corpora have focused on L2 English, and East-Asian languages as L2 are still under-represented. Some important exceptions are two subcorpora of L2 Japanese (C-JAS and I-JAS) included in the NINJAL platform (https://www.ninjal.ac.jp/english/database/subject/jsl/), the Jinan Chinese Learner Corpus or the Korean Learner Corpus, but they mainly focus on L1 English, the L1 Spanish - L2 Japanese combination being almost inexistent.

Aiming at filling the above gap, a new project has been launched to build an L1 Spanish - L2 Japanese learner corpus called Japanese as a Foreign Language Corpus (JFLCorp) as part of an on-going project featuring a wide variety of L1s (English, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, among others) and L2s (English, Spanish, Japanese). The L2 Spanish corpus (Corpus Escrito del Español L2, CEDEL2) (Lozano, 2009; Lozano & Mendikoetxea, 2013) is already available at http://cedel2.learnercorpora.com/, and the L2 English version (Corpus of English as a Foreign Language, COREFL) (Lozano, Díaz-Negrillo & Callies, 2020) is about to be launched (http://corefl.loearnercorpora.com).

In our presentation, we will introduce the criteria that have been strictly applied for JFLCorp following the 10 corpus-design principles stated by Sinclair (2005) and adapted to L2 corpora (Lozano & Medikoetxea, 2013). JFLCorp follows the same design principles as the other corpora within the Project (CEDEL2 and COREFL), which allows for multi-layered inter- and cross-linguistic comparisons amongst (sub)corpora. We will illustrate the online data collection method and present the different sections of the digital data-gathering tool, including a test of Japanese grammar to establish the level of competence of the participants. The transliteration criteria (Minami, 1998a, 1998b) will also be discussed. Finally, some preliminary corpus data will be reported and a demonstration will be done of the CEDEL2 search engine to illustrate how the future web-based JFLCorp interface will operate.

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