SEEFLEX - The Corpus of Secondary English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Exams

This version of the corpus may have been superseded by the GitHub repository

Abstract:

This report presents the Corpus of Secondary School English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Exams (SEEFLEX). In Germany, upper secondary school EFL exams feature recurring tasks targeting diverse text types. The SEEFLEX was developed to investigate how students complete these tasks linguistically and whether they meet the curricular requirements. The corpus contains data from 575 transcribed authentic curriculum-based examinations (n_texts = 1979, total = ~625.000 words). The metadata include standardized receptive vocabulary assessments, a cognition scale, the participants’ reading habits, social background, and their language experience and proficiency. Extensive xml mark-up was added to investigate the influence of inter alia source material, structural text features, and selected language mistakes. An online repository provides full-text access as well as ample additional resources, including an interactive Shiny application to investigate register variation in the corpus.