BACKBONE – Pedagogic Corpora for Content & Language Integrated Learning

BACKBONE is a European LLP (Languages) project involving 8 partners from 7 European countries: France, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Turkey and UK. The project addresses language learning needs with regard to pedagogically neglected languages and varieties including lesser taught languages, regional & socio-cultural varieties of more frequently taught languages, and European non-native speaker manifestations of English as a lingua franca. It proposes a pedagogically motivated corpus approach that enables teachers to record, annotate, and enrich spoken discourse resources. Based on the principles of learner and teacher autonomy, authenticated learning, and collaboration, the BACKBONE approach supports collaborative pedagogic deployment of CLIL-related corpus resources in Moodle courses. BACKBONE develops pedagogically motivated tools for corpus management, annotation, enrichment, and search. Seven sub-corpora of videorecorded interviews are compiled and enriched with learning materials: English, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Turkish as well as English as a lingua franca. Pedagogic piloting is carried out in CLIL settings in secondary, higher and vocational education.