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Article published In: International Journal of Learner Corpus Research: Online-First Articles

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SEEFLEX

The Corpus of Secondary English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Exams

ORCiD logo with link | RWTH Aachen University
Published online: 21 August 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.24027.pau
Abstract
This report presents the Corpus of Secondary School English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Exams (SEEFLEX). In Germany, upper secondary school EFL exams feature recurring tasks targeting diverse text types. The SEEFLEX was developed to investigate how students complete these tasks linguistically and whether they meet the curricular requirements. The corpus contains data from 575 transcribed authentic curriculum-based examinations (1,979 texts, ~625.000 words). The metadata include standardized receptive vocabulary assessments, a cognition scale, the participants’ reading habits, social background, and their language experience and proficiency. Extensive xml mark-up was added to investigate the influence of inter alia source material, structural text features, and selected language mistakes. An online repository provides full-text access as well as ample additional resources, including an interactive Shiny application to investigate register variation in the corpus.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data collection
  • 3.Ethical considerations
  • 4.Corpus description
    • 4.1Corpus size
    • 4.2Learner metadata
      • 4.2.1Language background
      • 4.2.2Vocabulary tests
      • 4.2.3The “Need for Cognition”
      • 4.2.4Reading habits
    • 4.3Written data
      • 4.3.1Text, situational and task-related metadata
      • 4.3.2Tasks
      • 4.3.3Genres and registers
  • 5.Data processing
    • 5.1Transcription and digitizing
    • 5.2Part-of-speech tagging
    • 5.3Mark-up
      • 5.3.1Structural mark-up
      • 5.3.2Language mark-up
      • 5.3.3Content mark-up
  • 6.Additional resources
    • 6.1Data pipeline
    • 6.2CQPweb
    • 6.3Shiny applications
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Open data badge and data availability statement
  • Notes
  • References
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