E stonian as a Second Language Teacher’s Tools (2021)

Abstract: The paper presents the results of the project “Teacher’s Tools” (et Õpetaja tööriistad) published as a subpage of the new language portal Sõnaveeb developed by the Institute of the Estonian Language. The toolbox includes four modules: vocabulary, grammar, communicative language activities and text evaluation. The tools are aimed to help teachers and specialists of Estonian as a second language plan courses, create new educational materials, exercises and tests based on CEFR level descriptions.

## resources of estonian as an l2 there are quite a few corpora available for the research of the estonian language (the biggest estonian corpus is the "estonian national corpus 2019" (1,5 billions words)) foot_0 . however, at the beginning of the project in 2017 there was a clear lack of resources available for the research of estonian as an l2. in order to fill this gap, the institute of estonian language compiled two types of corpora: 1) coursebook corpora and 2) learner corpora. as volodina and kokkinakis (2013) point out, the first type of corpora provides information about what and when education professionals found important for students to learn (passive linguistic competence), while learner corpora provide an indication of active linguistic competence. both need to be studied since the second is directly influenced by the first. the coursebook corpora were compiled in several stages and resulted in two groups of corpora: "estonian as a second language coursebook content corpus 2017" foot_1 (contains eight coursebooks for adult learners at levels a1-c1; 500 000 tokens) and "estonian as a second language school coursebook content corpus 2021" foot_2 (contains 27 school coursebooks for grades 1-12; 1 300 000 tokens). the learner corpus was compiled in 2019-2021 and contains 6700 estonian as an l2 young learner's texts. these are texts written mostly as state standard-determining tests (grades 3 and 6), basic school final examinations (grade 9) and state exams (grade 12) for 2017-2021. the data is available for analysis through the interface of the estonian learner language corpus emma foot_3 . the texts were not corrected or altered. both types of corpora were used for the development of "teacher's tools". the coursebook corpora were used primarily to create passive vocabulary word lists and for the analysis of explicit and implicit grammar teaching. the learner corpus was used for the creation and analysis of active vocabulary word lists and the dynamics of grammar acquisition.