MERLIN: An Online Trilingual Learner Corpus Empirically Grounding the European Reference Levels in Authentic Learner
Abstract
Since its publication in 2001, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has gained a leading role as an instrument of reference for language teaching and certification. Nonetheless, there is a growing concern about CEFR levels being insufficiently illustrated in terms of authentic learner data.
Such concern grows even stronger when considering languages other than English (cf., e.g., Hulstijn 2007, North 2000). In this paper, we present the MERLIN project that addresses this need by illustrating and validating the CEFR levels for Czech, German, and Italian.
To achieve its goal, we are developing a didactically motivated online platform to enable CEFR users to explore authentic written learner productions that have been related in a methodologically sophisticated and rigorous way to the CEFR levels. By making a significant number of learner productions freely accessible and easily searchable in a form that is richly annotated with linguistic characteristics and learner error type