Multilingual Corpus of Second Language Speech (MuSSeL) is Launched

The University of Utah’s Second Language Teaching and Research Center (L2TReC) is excited to announce that the Multilingual Corpus of Second Language Speech (MuSSeL) has been launched:  https://l2trec.utah.edu/learner-corpora/mussel/

MuSSeL is a developing spoken learner corpus representative of three learning contexts (child dual language immersion classroom, adult language classroom, and adult post-immersion) and six languages (Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish). The child samples in MuSSeL come from the Interpersonal Listening/Speaking (ILS) section of ACTFL Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL), and the adult samples come from ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview by Computer (OPIc). We are grateful to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and Language Testing International (LTI) for giving us access to the audio files.

The current version of MuSSeL includes 2,597 texts produced by 152 learners in four languages: Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, and is freely available to search and download. Each speech sample in MuSSeL is presented in four file formats: MP3, CHAT, TEXT, and PDF. The transcripts are tagged according to CHAT protocols established by CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) and can be analyzed using CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000) and other corpus analysis tools, such as AntConc and WordSmith Tools. MuSSeL is searchable using various filters, e.g., language, age group, grade level, gender, topic, and proficiency level.

For more information about MuSSeL and the corpus resources available at the Second Language Teaching and Research Center (L2TreC), please visit our page:  https://l2trec.utah.edu/learner-corpora/mussel/. MuSSeL is also available to the SLA community via Talkbank (special thanks to Brian MacWhinney).