EUROCALL 2009 Conference New trends in CALL: Working together Gandia Campus Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain) 9-12 September 2009 BACKBONE – Pedagogic Corpora for Content & Language Integrated Learning Kurt Kohn a, *, Petra Hoffstaedter b , Johannes Widmann a a University of Tübingen, Applied English Linguistics, Wilhelmstr. 50, D-72074 Tübingen, Germany b Petra Hoffstaedter, STZ Sprachlernmedien, Rheingasse 10, D-78462 Konstanz, Germany Abstract BACKBONE is a European LLP (Languages) project involving 8 partners from 7 European countries: France, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Turkey and UK. The project addresses language learning needs with regard to pedagogically neglected languages and varieties including lesser taught languages, regional & socio-cultural varieties of more frequently taught languages, and European non-native speaker manifestations of English as a lingua franca. It proposes a pedagogically motivated corpus approach that enables teachers to record, annotate, and enrich spoken discourse resources. Based on the principles of learner and teacher autonomy, authenticated learning, and collaboration, the BACKBONE approach supports collaborative pedagogic deployment of CLIL-related corpus resources in Moodle courses. BACKBONE develops pedagogically motivated tools for corpus management, annotation, enrichment, and search. Seven sub-corpora of video- recorded interviews are compiled and enriched with learning materials: English, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Turkish as well as English as a lingua franca. Pedagogic piloting is carried out in CLIL settings in secondary, higher and vocational education. © 2009 EUROCALL All rights reserved Keywords: Pedagogic corpora; CLIL; second language learning; foreign language learning; e-learning; moodle 1. Introduction & contextualisation Pedagogically neglected languages in Europe include lesser taught languages, regional & socio-cultural varieties of more frequently taught languages, and non-native speaker varieties of lingua franca languages. A dramatic lack of pedagogical inclusion with regard to these varieties can be witnessed across all educational sectors; this is even reinforced by a lack of suitable published learning materials. To meet these challenges, teachers are required to be more autonomous, in particular with regard to the availability of thematic contents relevant for language learning. In this respect, they find themselves in the same boat with teachers in bilingual subject classes or vocational courses. The methodological challenges are the same: how is it possible to support content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in its various manifestations and thus to make use of the motivating potential of language learning in authentic contexts? Important synergy effects * Contact author: Tel.: +49 7071 297 2377; Fax: +49 7071 29 5079. E-mail address: kurt.kohn@uni-tuebingen.de.