Versatile
  • Home
    • Subscribe
  • After IELTS
  • Blog
  • Books
  • VersaText
    • About Versatext
  • About Versatile
    • About me
  • Versatile Lessons for Teachers
  • VersaText Questionnaire

CORPUS OF NATIVE-SPEAKER YOUTH ENGLISH

Picture
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. ​
The Corpus of Native-Speaker Youth English 
Picture

The Book of Chunks

The Book of Chunks ​was produced as an ebook as one of the grant outputs. It can be downloaded here for free.
the_book_of_chunks_from_conye23.pdf
File Size: 3490 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

400 Words

A 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. ​
400_words.pdf
File Size: 64 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Picture

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.
Picture
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.
Picture
​Vit Baisa  who was largely responsible for programming SkELL and VersaText, developed tools and undertook high volume data collection and processing.​
Picture
Jennifer Law liaised with the British schools  and many other organisations, which we hoped would supply texts for the corpus. ​
Picture
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.
​Our Chinese partners are  Professor Yafu Gong and Professor Li, and at the British Council in Beijing, Fraser Bewick. ​

Services

Versatile Books
Courses
Resources
​
Moodle site

Organisation

About Versatile
James Thomas
​Privacy Policy
​Contact
​
Lulu
Picture


​
​© COPYRIGHT 2018. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Home
    • Subscribe
  • After IELTS
  • Blog
  • Books
  • VersaText
    • About Versatext
  • About Versatile
    • About me
  • Versatile Lessons for Teachers
  • VersaText Questionnaire