CORPUS OF NATIVE-SPEAKER YOUTH ENGLISH
The Corpus of Native-Speaking Youth English (CONYE) was created in 2022 under the auspices of a British Council China grant awarded to TransformELT (UK). The corpus contains c.50 million words of written and spoken language that young, mainly British, people read and write, hear and say. It is therefore a corpus representing receptive and productive skills. The target age range is 9 to 15.
From this corpus, collocations, chunks and sentences containing words that are on the wordlists created for the New National English Curriculum in China were processed and downloaded into a database.
The data from the corpus has been downloaded into an online database which can be accessed by clicking on the screenshot below, or via the URL: bit.ly/conye23. Read the User Guide on the site to understand how it works and how to use it.
From this corpus, collocations, chunks and sentences containing words that are on the wordlists created for the New National English Curriculum in China were processed and downloaded into a database.
The data from the corpus has been downloaded into an online database which can be accessed by clicking on the screenshot below, or via the URL: bit.ly/conye23. Read the User Guide on the site to understand how it works and how to use it.
The Corpus of Native-Speaker Youth English
The Book of ChunksThe Book of Chunks was produced as an ebook as one of the grant outputs. It can be downloaded here for free.
400 WordsA second research question asked what words are commonly used by 9 to 15 year old native speaking children that are not on the NNEC list. Frequency lists were derived from CONYE23 and compared with the NNEC list. A list of 400 words was manually selected.
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People
This project was led by James Thomas with tireless assistance from TransformELT directors, Alan Pulverness and Sarah Mount, along with Vit Baisa and Jen Law and a team of others.
The lead researcher on this project is James Thomas, who was the Director of MA TESOL at Webster University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan at the time.
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Vit Baisa who was largely responsible for programming SkELL and VersaText, developed tools and undertook high volume data collection and processing.
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Jennifer Law liaised with the British schools and many other organisations, which we hoped would supply texts for the corpus.
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The RIA grant was won by TransformELT in December 2021, and the project is managed by Alan Pulverness, one of the Norwich-based company's three directors.
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Our Chinese partners are Professor Yafu Gong and Professor Li, and at the British Council in Beijing, Fraser Bewick.
