This
course is devoted to working with corpora collected by Pfaff in a series of
research projects carried out in Berlin from 1978 – 2013. The studies focus on
the German second language as well on the development of the mother tongues /
heritage languages and English 3rd/foreign language of children and
adolescents. Data come from four cross-sectional studies of participants
growing up with varying degrees of contact with native German peers in their
neighborhoods and classrooms and a longitudinal study in a Turkish/German
bilingual day care center / preschool which followed the children into the
early primary school years. After a brief overview of the studies, their
methodologies, and selected findings, we will focus on hands-on work with
transcripts of oral production and, for the older participants, written production
in German and their first, second or foreign languages. Course work will
include exploration of the texts (analysis of selected linguistic features)
individually or in small groups and participation in the archiving project to
post the material to the HU Media Repository archive “BERLANGDEV” (Berlin
Language Development).
- Course owner: Carol Pfaff