Project MOSLA: Recording Every Moment of Second Language Acquisition
Masato Hagiwara Joshua Tanner
Second language acquisition (SLA) is a complex and dynamic process. Many SLA
studies that have attempted to record and analyze this process have typically
focused on a single modality (e.g., textual output of learners), covered only a
short period of time, and/or lacked control (e.g., failed to capture every
aspect of the learning process). In Project MOSLA (Moments of Second Language
Acquisition), we have created a longitudinal, multimodal, multilingual, and
controlled dataset by inviting participants to learn one of three target
languages (Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese) from scratch over a span of two years,
exclusively through online instruction, and recording every lesson using Zoom.
The dataset is semi-automatically annotated with speaker/language IDs and
transcripts by both human annotators and fine-tuned state-of-the-art speech
models. Our experiments reveal linguistic insights into learners' proficiency
development over time, as well as the potential for automatically detecting the
areas of focus on the screen purely from the unannotated multimodal data. Our
dataset is freely available for research purposes and can serve as a valuable
resource for a wide range of applications, including but not limited to SLA,
proficiency assessment, language and speech processing, pedagogy, and
multimodal learning analytics.