Internship report
Nikolay Stankov
As a student of "European Linguistics" at the University of Freiburg, I have the opportunity to do a 6week internship at a university in a foreign country. Through the "LingNet" database, I was able to
quickly find an appropriate place: I encountered the "KOMMA" project, developed by the University
of Bolzano, Italy. The aim of the "KOMMA" project is to study the language skills of high school
students in the German language schools of South Tyrol and how they may be influenced by the
bilingual situation in the region. As language contact is one of the areas I am interested in, I applied
to Prof. Dr. Franceschini, the director of the project, and it was settled that I could start my
internship in the third week of September 2014.
After I arrived in Bolzano and met the project team, Prof. Franceschini, who acted as my tutor, asked
me to collect a number of books containing information relating to the project, and to read and
summarize one of these. Since I wanted to get a more precise understanding of the development of
linguistic abilities in school, I chose Schreibentwicklung und Textproduktion by Prof. Dr. Michael
Becker-Mrotzek, which deals with the problems of the development of students’ writing skills and
contains some interesting information on a research project in this field. I presented my summary to
Prof. Franceschini, who returned it to me with some very useful feedback.
Having completed my first two tasks, I was sent to the team working on the corpus of the project.
With their help, I familiarized myself with the data, including the essays that were only available in
handwritten form. Since Prof. Franceschini thought that the written corpus needed to be expanded
further, I was given the job of transcribing the remaining texts. For the next few days, I managed to
transcribe 20 of the essays, enough to start analysing the corpus. I then had the opportunity to
conduct one of the first analyses of the data. I began by measuring the Type-Token-Ratio in the
essays from two different schools in South Tyrol using the "AntConc" concordance software, but
found no significant differences between the schools. The next step I had to take, after discussing the
results with Prof. Franceschini, was to classify all words in the written corpus according to parts of
speech and then compare the results with a corpus of oral interviews supplied by the IT team of the
project. The analysis and subsequent comparison yielded interesting differences in the use of nouns,
adverbs and conjugations across both corpora, which could lead to further insights into the way
spoken and written text production functions.
After this last task, I returned to Freiburg with a lot of new ideas and experiences and with many
good memories. I think that in the six weeks spent in Bolzano I was able to improve both my
theoretical knowledge and practical analytical skills, and also to apply what I had learned in the past
two semesters, especially by managing large datasets with statistical and concordance software such
as "R" and "AntConc". I am certain the experience and data I have gathered during my internship will
be of great use to me in my further academic development.