Immersive programmes in the south-west of Germany – Comparing learner variables across educational settings through learner corpus metadata

In the south-west of Germany, a variety of educational settings has been created in recent years with respect to language learning/acquisition. Immersive programmes have been established at the primary level (cf. KMBW 2004a), and CLIL options have been introduced in secondary schools (cf. KMBW 2004b). Thus, it is hoped that learners will be enabled to learn/acquire English in the way that will best fit their needs. But is it true that students choose a learning environment according to individual learner characteristics? And will the chosen programme in turn influence learner variables? To investigate linguistic differences between participants in the various programmes, a corpus is being compiled from argumentative essays as well as from an experimental task completed by learners at Year 11 level. These learners generally have an experience of 6-10 years of language learning and acquisition. To enable reliable contrastive interlanguage analysis (cf. Granger 1996) across learning environments, the corpus is annotated with a rich set of metadata. Results from an informal questionnaire provide information on age, sex, mother tongue, school career etc. In addition, pupils have been subjected to psychometric testing, making it possible to assess cognitive skills (cf. Horn 2003) and motivational factors (cf. Petermann & Winkel 2007). By means of these metadata, a comparison between participants and non-participants in CLIL programmes may be undertaken. Another subset of metadata assesses the learners' exposure to the English language during their spare time. Thus, possible effects of learning environments on learner variables may be detected. The proposed paper will describe the learner corpus that is being compiled and will then discuss the results of a contrastive analysis of learner variables, which are annotated as metadata, across educational settings.