Design of tasks and materials to collect a corpus of Mexican learners of English

Abstract

This paper describes the design process of an oral interview to be used in the collection of language-production data of university learners of English as a second language. The aim of applying this instrument is to build a relatively large and representative corpus of learners to be used in research about second-language acquisition in Mexico and for the creation of English language teaching strategies and programs consistent with the particular characteristics of Mexican students. To this end, we carried out rigorous task selection and materials design during this instrument design process to ensure two key aspects in the construction of the learner corpus: authenticity and representativeness. This process resulted in a four-part oral interview aligned to the monologic spoken productive activities according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, namely descriptive, informative, and argumentative. These tasks also represent three text types according to the multidimensional analysis for oral texts, information-oriented, stance-oriented, and narrative.