Spencer corpus includes a sub-corpus in Spanish and a sub-corpus in Catalan. The Spanish sub-corpus contains 130 texts produced by 80 monolingual Spanish speakers from Córdoba. These participants belong to four different groups of age which correspond to four different educational levels: 9 years old (4th grade of Primaria), 12 years old (1st grade of ESO), 17 years old (1st grade of Bachillerato/3rd grade of BUP) and adults (university students between 20 and 30 years old).

Each of these groups consists of 20 participants. The Catalan sub-corpus also contains 320 texts produced by Spanish-Catalan bilingual speakers from Barcelona belonging to the same groups of age and educational levels than the participants of the Spanish sub-corpus.

All texts were obtained following the same procedure. The participants were shown a very short soundless video without text, which displayed conflictive situations in high school (for instance, boys copying or girls shunning a classmate).
After this, they were asked to write a short composition about a personal experience exposing also any personal consideration on the topic of school conflicts.

Each participant produced four texts: two narrative texts (one oral and one written) and two expositive texts (one oral and one written). All these texts share a common topic: conflictive situations taking place in educational contexts.

The corpus data was gathered within the context of the Developping literacy in different contexts and different languages project (Spencer Foundation, Chicago. It consists of texts written in six different European languages and in Hebrew.

IP Ruth Berman, Tel Aviv University

Coordinadora en España, Liliana Tolchinsky

Other publications

• Berman, R. A., Verhoeven, L. (2002). "Crosslinguistic perspectives on developing text production abilities in speech and writing", Written Languages and Literacy, Volume 5, 1-44
• Berman, R. A., Ragnarsdóttir, H., Strömqvist, S. (2002). "Discourse stance", Written Languages and Literacy, Volume 5, 2, 255-290.
• Tolchinsky, L., Johansson, V., y Zamora, A. (2002). "Text openings and closings in writing and speech: Autonomy and differentiation", Written Language and Literacy, 5, 219-255.
• Tolchinsky, L., Rosado, E. (2005). "The effect of literacy, text type, and modality on the use of grammatical means for agency alternation", Journal of Pragmatics, 27, 209-237