German Summary Corpus (GerSumCo)

The GerSumCo (German Summary Corpus) is a learner corpus that consists of syntheses written by advanced L2 German learners (CEFR level B2/C1) and L1 German natives. The corpus has been created with the aim to contrastively analyse the academic writing of L2 German and L2 German students.

The two subcorpora (L1 and L2) contain a total of 286 (178 L1 texts and 108 L2 texts) written by 286 students of fourteen universities and language schools. The texts were collected in 2022, 2023 and 2024 in the context of my PhD research that aims to perform a contrastive interlanguage analysis with GerSumCo and Beldeko to see whether L1-specific features are present.

The summaries consist on average of 230 words each. The texts were written in person, on computers. Students were allowed to use online dictionaries. They had to summarise two texts about a topic related to language variation in German (Kiezdeutsch, Mundartdebatte in der Schweiz, Viadrinisch, Varianten-Wörterbuch des Deutschen).

Planned publication of the corpus

The GerSumCo is published and is stored in the Eurac Research CLARIN Centre Repository.