Compiling a Corpus of Taiwanese Students' Spoken English

This paper reports the compilation of a corpus of Taiwanese students’ spoken English, which is one of the twenty subcorpora of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin et al., 2010). LINDSEI is one of the largest corpora of learner speech. The compilation process follows the design criteria of LINDSEI so as to ensure comparability across sub-corpora. The participants, procedures for data collection and process of transcription are all recorded. Sixty thirdor fourth-year English majors in Taiwan are interviewed and recorded in English. Each interview is accompanied by a profile which contains information about such learner variables as age, gender, mother tongue, country, English learning context, knowledge of other foreign languages, amount of time spent in English-speaking countries and such interviewer variables as gender, mother tongue, knowledge of foreign languages and degree of familiarity with the interviewees. Another variable, the learners’ English proficiency level based on the results of international standardised tests is collected; this is not available in other sub-corpora of LINDSEI. The participants’ proficiency is similarly distributed across B1 to C1 levels in the Common European Framework of Reference. This paper concludes with a discussion of the contributions and research potential of the corpus.