Foreign words in interviews with EFL learners: bridging lexical gaps?

The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) contains informal interviews with intermediate to advanced level learners of English as a foreign language. The interviews follow the same set pattern and are made up of three main tasks: a personal narrative based on a set topic (an experience that taught them a lesson, a country that impressed them, or a film or play they liked/disliked), a free discussion mainly about university life, hobbies, foreign travel or plans for the future and a picture description. Although the interviews are all conducted in English, 'foreign' words sometimes feature in both the interviewers' and the learner interviewees' contributions. This poster sets out to examine and compare the use of foreign words in five of the subcorpora included on the LINDSEI CD-ROM (Gilquin et al. 2010): interviews with Dutch-, French-, German-, Italian- and Spanish-speaking EFL learners (LINDSEI_Dutch, LINDSEI_French, LINDSEI_German, LINDSEI_Italian, LINDSEI_Spanish). These subcorpora contain between 140,000 and 80,000 words of interviewee and interviewer speech. Foreign words have been specially marked up in the LINDSEI corpus ( WORD(S)