Iztok Kosem

Compilation, transcription and usage of a reference speech corpus: the case of the Slovene corpus GOS

In recent years, building reference speech corpora was an important part of the activities which provided the necessary linguistic infrastructure in many European countries, for languages with many speakers (e.g., French, German, Spanish, Italian) as well as for those with smaller numbers of speakers (e.g., Swedish, Dutch, Czech, Slovak). This paper describes the process of the creation of a reference speech corpus and its distribution to potential users, as it was done in the case of the Slovene corpus GOS. The corpus structure and fieldwork experiences with recording, labelling system, and two levels of transcription (pronunciation-based and standardized) are described, as well as the main characteristics of the corpus interface (web concordancer) and the availability of the original corpus files.

Corpus-Based Resources for L1 Teaching: The Case of Slovene

The chapter highlights the potential of corpus-based resources for language education in K-12, more specifically for L1 teaching in the higher grades of elementary school and in the secondary school. Presented are two freely available online resources that were recently developed for teaching and learning Slovene as L1. Firstly, the Solar corpus (www.korpus-solar.net), containing approximately one million words, comprises of texts written by Slovene elementary and secondary school students. More than half of the corpus texts include teacher corrections of language errors; furthermore, the errors have been manually categorised according to the classification scheme developed specifically for the project. The primary purpose of the corpus is to enable empirical research into communication competence of Slovene students and, based on that research, improve the methods and materials for Slovene language teaching. Secondly, the corpus-based Pedagogical Grammar Portal (http://slovnica.slovenscina.si) is an online language resource offering interactive explanations of language problems most commonly experienced by Slovene students when writing. The portal is aimed at students aged between 12 and 18 years. The content of the portal is based on the analysis of three corpora: the Solar corpus, the reference Gigafida corpus, and the GOS corpus of spoken Slovene. The chapter provides a description of the Solar corpus and the Pedagogical Grammar Portal, focusing on the applicative value of the results. Furthermore, the acquired know-how regarding the design and the implementation of such resources is presented, e.g. by highlighting the biggest challenges of the projects, and the pros and cons of the applied solutions. Finally, the chapter offers a wider discussion on the usefulness of the results for L1 teaching in K-12 education.

Odziv na “Anketo o slovenščini” projekta Jezikovna politika Republike Slovenije in potrebe uporabnikov

A Survey on the Use of Slovene (the project “Language Policy in the Republic of Slovenia and the Needs of the Speakers of Slovene”)