I have about 50~60 pages of narrowly transcribed data from audio/video recordings of 4 Japanese college students playing a game called "Don't Starve Together" in the same room together from when I was practicing transcribing. I have had this data for a while now, but have yet to do anything with it. It seems a waste to discard so much data, so rather than do that, I though I would ask the general SLA/TESOL/CALL community how this data might serve some research purpose, if any.
--Further description of the data--
The data covers approximately 7 hours and 20 minutes of gameplay time over 8 play sessions. The students were simply told to speak only in English while playing the game as they liked, and then left to their own devices. They were allowed to ask the instructor language related questions as needed during play, but otherwise there was no formal instruction. The transcription uses regular othography, and includes conventions for:
- fillers, hesitations, pauses, silences and glottal stops
- lengthening of sounds
- irregular word stresses and volume changes (tracked individually)
- laughing, gasping
- L1 use
- unintelligible or uncertain speech
- self-talk (mumbled or whispered, with no apparent target)
- emotional charge (such as "surprise", "disbelief", "playful", etc.)
- and imbedded context notes which give information about what is happening when text alone would not be enough to decipher the reason for a given utterance. Most notably, this includes all non-verbal communication, but extends to giving the reasons behind a sudden "gasp", etc. such as "a monster appears onscreen", or "S's character dies".
--The subjects--
The students were all females between the ages of 18 and 20, majoring in physical or occupational therapy. No formal English proficiency pre-test or post-test was done, however by my judgement, one was a bit more fluent than the other 3, however I would still place them all in a low level of English proficiency. The same one described herself as an experienced gamer, while the other 3 were not. Prior to the study, two of the students already knew each other, as did the other two (i.e. the group consisted of 2 sets of 2 friends).
--Other notes--
- I'm familiar with typical pronunciation errors made by Japanese students, and I was only using standard orthography, so I didn't notate any of the common pronunciation errors they made when it was more than obvious what they intended to say (e.g. r/l or v/b substitutions, adding unnecessary vowel sounds after consonants). That said, I did note when an intended word was pronounced as a similar word with a completely different meaning (e.g. I noted that "pinecone" was pronounced as "pie coat", but I did not note when "very interesting" was pronounced as "berry intarestingu".
- On occasion, conversation was initiated by me (and transcribed). This was kept to a minimum, but reasons included noticing a student having technical difficulties, or giving a small piece of advice for the game if I saw them struggle with something for a long time.
If anyone has any ideas for some research I might do with this data, I'm all ears. Otherwise I think I'm just gonna toss it.
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