photo: Tuija Määttä
The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Tuija Määttä, a lecturer and researcher at the Umeå University describes how she utilizes the International Corpus of Learner Finnish (ICLFI) in the Language Bank.
I am Tuija Määttä, a lecturer of Finnish language and a researcher at the Department of Language Studies of the Umeå University (Institutionen för språkstudier, Umeå universitet). I have a teaching appointment, and I teach various classes from elementary level to doctoral students. I do research in my free time.
I have always been fascinated by elementary level students’ learning, acquisition and development in the Finnish language. Therefore, in recent years, I have observed from many points of view how Swedish-speaking students of Finnish use the Finnish location cases in their written assignments. Another interesting research topic is vocabulary. I use the International Corpus of Learner Finnish which contains a subcorpus of Swedish-speaking Finnish learners. The texts in the subcorpus originate specifically in Umeå, and I have been collecting them from my elementary level students already for ten years.
The ICLFI corpus is presently deposited in the Language Bank. The ICLFI project was launched in 2007 at professor Jarmo Jantunen’s instigation. I have participated in the project since the beginning. One of its goals was to create a relatively large corpus of learner Finnish containing written assignments by native speakers of various languages. Now that the corpus contains over a million words, it is great that it is open and easily available in the Language Bank for all researchers interested in learner Finnish.
Information about the International Corpus of Learner Finnish (in Finnish)
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.
