The TRAWL Corpus - Tracking Written Learner Language
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The TRAWL Corpus is a longitudinal and multilingual young learner corpus with authentic school writing by students in Norwegian schools. The texts are written in five languages: Norwegian and English (L1 and L2 for the majority of the students) and French, German and Spanish (L3 for most of the students). They are written as part of ordinary language classes; some come with teacher feedback, and some exist in a first and a second revised version.
The corpus compilation is ongoing, and texts are collected from school years 5–13 (ages 10-18) for English and years 8–13 (ages 13-18) for French, German and Spanish. Norwegian texts are collected from a subset of the same students. Data collection has started at different levels, and more than 1200 students have currently contributed texts over a minimum of one year and a maximum of four years. The corpus comprises longitudinal as well as cross-sectional data.
The first online version of the TRAWL Corpus (released February 2023) contains 1664 texts written by 216 students, 988 with teacher feedback. The data is organized into separate sub-corpora, one for each language.
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French |
German |
Spanish |
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More detailed information about the corpus and the search interface can be found in the reference article:
Dirdal, H., Hasund, I. K., Drange, E.-M., Vold, E. T., & Berg, E. M. (2022). Design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) corpus: A longitudinal and multilingual young learner corpus. Nordic Journal of Language Teaching and Learning, 10(2), 115–135. https://doi.org/10.46364/njltl.v10i2.1005
Manuals
Read
the TRAWL manual (in Norwegian)
The VESPA manual (VESPA macros) were used in the project.
Read the VESPA manual
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Researchers and teacher trainers can apply for access to the corpus by filling in this form.
Credits
The TRAWL Corpus has been compiled by a research group with members from the University of Oslo, the University of Agder, the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
The online interface has been developed by the Text Laboratory at the University of Oslo.
The compilation of the corpus has been made possible through support from our institutions and the Inland Norway Regional Research Fund (RFF Innlandet). Data from the MULTIWRITE project (2021–2025), funded by the Research Council of Norway (NRF), will also be incorporated into the corpus.
The TRAWL Corpus would not exist without the generous cooperation of schools, teachers and students who have contributed their work. Many thanks to all of you!
