Exploring and Archiving Multilingual Corpora: Studies of German, Turkish and English in Berlin

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 3^rd/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).