BYLEC - Baltic Young Learners of English Corpus

Our Research

The BYLEC project (Baltic Young Learners of English Corpus) is a cooperation with the universities in Tartu (Estonia), Daugavpils (Latvia), Kaunas (Lithuania), Warsaw (Poland), and Kaliningrad (Russia) on the creation of a corpus of written English produced by 12-year-olds and funded by special funding from the Rector to interdisciplinary projects in the Baltic region.

The project aims to invest in a corpus of international learner English with data from 12-year-olds in the Baltic Region in order to investigate their English language to identify differences in their interlanguage which are of significance for their written proficiency in English and successful lingua franca communication. The focus is on the interlanguage of Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Swedish learners of English.

The number of participating learners will be at least some 100 learners per country and they are at 20 schools in six countries.

Benefit to the teachers who are participate the project

After the completion of the project school teachers will receive a certificate from Uppsala University, Sweden which gives information about the school teacher’s contribution in the research project.

Possible Research Questions on the Data

What are the specific productive patterns of young learners’ second language production in these six countries?

What intercultural aspects, societal factors and native language interference could explain the identified variation in learner language?

What features of spoken English and digital communication emerge in their written production such as discourse markers, emoticons, traits from texting messages, multiple causal coordination and informal vocabulary?

What are the pedagogical implications for classroom work with writing in English of these identified differences?

Read more about our research – The BYLEC project (Baltic Young Learners of English Corpus) Pdf, 556 kB.