TLT-school: a Corpus of Non Native Children Speech
Table 1: Evaluation of L2 linguistic competences in Trentino: level, grade, age and number of pupils participating in the evaluation campaigns. Most of the pupils did both the English and the German tests.
['CEFR', 'Grade, School', 'Age', 'Number of pupils 2016', 'Number of pupils 2017', 'Number of pupils 2018']
In Trentino, an autonomous region in northern Italy, there is a series of evaluation campaigns underway for testing L2 linguistic competence of Italian students taking proficiency tests in both English and German. A set of three evaluation campaigns is underway, two having been completed in 2016 and 2018, and a final one scheduled in 2020. Note that the “TLT-school” corpus refers to only the 2018 campaign, that was split in two parts: 2017 try-out data set (involving about 500 pupils) and the actual 2018 data (about 2500 pupils). Each of the three campaigns (i.e. 2016, 2018 and 2020) involves about 3000 students ranging from 9 to 16 years, belonging to four different school grade levels and three proficiency levels (A1, A2, B1). Several tests, aimed at assessing the language learning skills of the students, were carried out by means of multiple-choice questions, which can be evaluated automatically. However, a detailed linguistic evaluation cannot be performed without allowing the students to express themselves in both written sentences and spoken utterances, which typically require the intervention of human experts to be scored.