Photo: Rikupekka Leinonen
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Ivana Kováčová, doctoral candidate at the University of Oulu tells us about her research on the International Corpus of Learner Finnish.
I am Ivana Kováčová, doctoral candidate at the University of Oulu. I come from Slovakia where I studied Finnish at the Charles University in Prague. I moved to Finland in 2015 and two years later I graduated at the University of Oulu as Master of Arts majoring in the Finnish language.
In my doctoral research I study the multimodal interaction of the Czech and Slovak living in Finland in their everyday discussions with the Finns. I am interested in how my informants use various bodily means (such as gestures and glances) when speaking the foreign language in situations characterized by searching for words and code switching.
In my Pro Gradu thesis I studied the use of the essive case in the writings of some Czech learners of Finnish. The focus in the work was on how the Czech language interferes in the usage, and also on whether the accuracy and the more complex use of essive increases as the skill level raises.
The texts written by Czech S2-students are part of the International Corpus of Learner Finnish (ICLFI) that comprises texts written by learners of Finnish as a foreign language from more than 20 universities around the world. The part of the corpus from the Czech is morphologically annotated and error annotation, which offered a possibility for me to study the correct as well as the erroneous use of the essive case. The texts in the corpus have also been divided in different skill levels as defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Dividing texts into skill levels has helped me to analyse the progress in the learners’ use of the essive case in different stages of the learning process.
The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.
All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive.
