How to find Writers of Vegan Restaurant Descriptions. The Use of Corpora in designing a Language Proficiency Test

Abstract

In the course of internationalisation, the start-up company “Grünzeug GmbH” wanted to launch their vegan restaurant guide app “vanilla bean” in the United States of America. For the U.S. launch, the app’s database needed to hold descriptions  of at least 25,000 different venues. Since the company is growing, suitable personnel for the U.S. launch had to be found. To make hiring more effective, the company wanted to use a language test. This test should assess the applicants’ suitability for writing descriptions of vegan venues in the U.S. A tailormade test had to be crafted for this purpose. The approach was to use corpora to enhance the validity of language assessment. To design tasks corresponding to the actual job of description  writing, a requirement profile was formulated to evaluate the corpus data. This project sets the foundation for future research on the successful combination of corpora and language assessment.