=Topic=
The strong relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension has been thoroughly researched and confirmed (Laufer, 1992; Hsueh-Chao, & Nation, 2000). Readers should ideally know between 95% and 98% of the words in a text to adequately comprehend it (Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010). Given that the larger the vocabulary, the better the comprehension of texts, foreign language curriculums should stress the need to teach new vocabulary items. As learners cannot easily learn thousands of words, it is crucial for foreign language curriculum designers, publishers of educational materials and textbooks, or even teachers to identify the most important words to teach at each stage of the learning process.
The most common answers to that challenge have been (1) to use frequency lists obtained from a large corpus of texts intended for native readers (Kucera and Francis, 1967; Leech et al., 2001; Brysbaert and New, 2009; etc.) and (2) to rely on expert knowledge, such as teacher expertise or linguists’ recommendations (Beacco et al., 2008; Capel, 2010). The advantage of the latter approach is its ability to relate words to some difficulty scale, in particular that of the CEFR, but its empirical foundations have been challenged. More recently, new trends have been investigated, such as frequency lists projected onto the CEFR scale (Kilgariff et al., 2014) or resources in which word frequencies are estimated on texts intended for L2 readers (François et al., 2014; Dürlich and François, 2018). However, these new trends only focus on the lexicon, whereas the CEFR Reference Level Descriptors (Beacco et al., 2008; O’Keeffe and Mark, 2017) may include grammatical structures, functions, pattern of spelling development, morphemic patterns, etc.
Recent efforts have opened new avenues for research in the field of graded resources for language learning. Lindström et al. (2021) aim at developing data-driven CEFR-graded resources for grammatical or morphological patterns. In parallel, new lexical resources have used meanings as the main entry instead of the spelling form (Alfter, 2021; Tack et al. 2018).
This workshop therefore aims at bringing together all current efforts about manual or automatic building of language resources with CEFR labels and at strengthening current initiatives by building a community around these topics.
=Topics of interest=
We solicit abstracts on all topics related to CEFR-graded resources for language learning, such as (but not limited to) the following themes:
* creation of CEFR-graded resources (either via manual or automatic processes)
* validation of CEFR-graded resources on various publics
* graded resources for vocabulary, syntax, semantics, pragmatics
* practical applications of graded resources (for language learning, natural language processing, pedagogy, etc.)
* theoretical foundations of graded resources
* discussion of the pros and cons of the CEFR scale for graded resources
* comparison between CEFR-graded resources and other graded resources
=Abstract submission=
Abstracts are to be written in English (max 500 words, excluding title and references) and should be anonymized.
Abstracts are to be submitted in PDF format to the electronic conference management platform EasyChair using the following link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gr4l2
All authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full-length paper for the post-workshop proceedings, planned to be published in Cahiers du Cental. Submitted papers will undergo another round of reviews in order to decide which papers to include in the proceedings.
==Presentation==
Accepted abstracts will be presented orally. Presentations may be short or long, at the discretion of the organizing committee. You may indicate a preference during abstract submission.
=Important dates=
15 September: Abstract submission deadline
15 October: Registration opens
20 October: Notification of acceptance
15 November: Registration closes
7 December: Workshop date
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15 January: Full paper submission deadline
15 March: Notification of acceptance
1st May: Camera-ready version deadline
=Location=
The workshop will be located in Louvain-la-Neuve.
During the workshop days, participants can enjoy the beautiful Christmas market in town.
Given the current situation, we are open to remote presentation and participation. However, we feel that the social aspect is important to the workshop and would encourage participating in person, as far as measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of the workshop allow.
=Registration=
Registration opens October 15, 2021 and closes November 15, 2021!
Registration will be free of charge.
=Drinks in the evening=
To wrap up the day in a nice way, we plan on organizing a cocktail drink for participants followed by a hot wine at the Christmas market. More information about registration for this event will be communicated at a later point in time.
=Invited speakers=
The workshop will include four invited talks, opening with a presentation of the CEFRLex project.
Invited speakers:
* Damien De Meyere & Thomas François
* Núria Gala
* Elena Volodina
* Bill McDowell
=Website=
More information can be found on the website:
https://uclouvain.be/fr/instituts-recherche/ilc/plin/gr4l2.html
=Scientific committee=
* David Alfter (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Serge Bibauw (UCLouvain, KULeuven, Belgium)
* Barbara de Cock (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Damien De Meyere (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Cédrick Fairon (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Thomas François (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Nuria Gala (Aix-Marseille Université, France)
* Maribel Montero (UGent, Belgium)
* Ferran Suñer Muñoz (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Kaori Sugiyama (Seinan Gakuin University, Japan)
* Amalia Todirascu (Strasbourg University, France)
* Patrick Watrin (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Elena Volodina (Gothenburg University, Sweden)
=Organizing committee=
* David Alfter (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Barbara de Cock (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Damien De Meyere (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Thomas François (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Nuria Gala (Aix-Marseille Université, France)
* Ferran Suñer Muñoz (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Alice Pintard (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Elena Volodina (Gothenburg University, Sweden)
* Patrick Watrin (UCLouvain, Belgium)
* Nami Yamaguchi (UCLouvain, Belgium)