Learner corpora

In this paper we present NLI-PT, the first Por-tuguese dataset compiled for Native Language Identification (NLI), the task of identifying an author's first language based on their second language writing. The dataset includes 1,868 student essays written by learners of European Portuguese, native speakers of the Swedish. NLI-PT includes the original student text and four different types of annotation: POS, fine-grained POS, constituency parses, and dependency parses. NLI-PT can be used not only in NLI but also in research on several topics in the field of Second Language Acquisition and educational NLP. We discuss possible applications of this dataset and present the results obtained for the first lexical baseline system for Portuguese NLI.

This article describes ongoing research within the TREACLE project. TREACLE aims to profile the specific grammatical skills of Spanish university learners of English at various proficiency levels, and, on the basis of these profiles, develop proposals for re-designing curriculum and teaching materials particularly focused on the real needs of Spanish students at distinct proficiency levels. To this end, we are developing a methodology for grammatical profiling of proficiency levels using learner corpora.
Some approaches (e.g. Dagneaux et al. 1998) have explored grammatical competence of learners by looking at the errors they make at each proficiency level. However, we believe that to get a clear picture of learner competence, we need to measure not only what they do wrong (errors), but also what they do right. We thus take a two-pronged approach, involving automatic syntactic tagging of the corpus to see what structures students are attempting, and manual error annotation to see what they do wrong. This paper presents our approach and reports on some preliminary results in profiling provided by our combined approach.

Studies of morpheme acquisition indicate that Japanese learners "acquire" possessive constructions earlier in the acquisition order than native speaker children. However, while the possessive may not present the same kind of problems as the article system, does for Japanese learners, this does not mean that it is not problematic. This paper gives a brief account of the s-genitive and then compares Japanese learner usage taken to native speaker data taken from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) corpus. The evidence from this corpus indicates that Japanese learners tend to overuse the s-genitive, in particular using it with inanimate and abstract possessor nouns in contexts where the native speakers do not use possessives. There was a tendency among Japanese learners to use the s-genitive in noun-phrases with generic reference, where native speakers used non-possessive noun compounds. The paper concludes with a caveat about the degree to which overall generalizations about Japanese students’ usage of the s-genitive can be made from this corpus alone, given the limited genres of the written texts in the corpus. In particular, the representation of instances of the possessive with generic reference in the corpus may be untypical of s-genitive use overall. The paper concludes with a call for further studies using learner corpora with a broader range of text types and topics.

Corpus Linguistics, Context and Culture demonstrates the potential of corpus linguistic methods for investigating language patterns across a range of contexts. Organised in three sections, the chapters range from detailed case studies on lexico-grammatical patterns to fundamental discussions of meaning as part of the ‘discourse, contexts and cultures’ theme. The final part on ‘learner contexts’ specifically emphasises the need for mixed-method approaches and the consideration of pedagogical implications for real world contexts.

Beyond its contribution to current debates in the field, this edited volume indicates new directions in cross-disciplinary work.

The article aims to describe the inter-rater reliability of translation quality assessment (TQA) in translator training, calculated as a measure of raters’ agreement either on the number of points awarded to each translation under a holistic rating scale or the types and number of translation mistakes marked by raters in the same translations. We analyze three different samples of student translations assessed by several different panels of raters who used different methods of assessment and draw conclusions about statistical reliability of real-life TQA results in general and objective trends in this essentially subjective activity in particular. We also try to define the more objective data as regards error-analysis based TQA and suggest an approach to rank error-marked translations which can be used for subsequent relative grading in translator training.

This article presents results from a comparative study of the production of linguistic metaphors in argumentative essays written by advanced Norwegian learners of English with those written by A-level British pupils. Instantiations of novel metaphor are focused on here, that is, those linguistic metaphors whose contextual meanings are not lexicalized as entries in standard dictionaries.  I present a typology of novel metaphor, and then illustrate this typology with instances from  my data. Cases range from the occurrence of deliberate metaphor to L1 transference to problems relating to, for example, homophones, syntax, attribution, and orthography. Significant differences in the observed frequency of novel metaphor types in the two corpora are uncovered, with the Norwegian writers employing more deliberate and non-deliberate novel metaphor.

This research project explores the relationship between lexical and syntactic complexity measures in the learner's use of the language learned. Statistically significant positive correlations were predicted. The predictions were tested by analyzing an English learner corpus which comprises 152 essays written during in-class exams conducted at the International University of Sarajevo. The corpus was analyzed with the Lexical Complexity Analyzer (Ai & Lu, 2010; Lu, 2012) and the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2014; 2010). A correlation test between 25 measures of lexical complexity (LC) and 14 measures of syntactic complexity (SC) produced a large number of statistically significant positive and several statistically significant negative correlations. The overall findings show that lexical and syntactic complexity measures only partly account for each other and imply that automatic ratings of L2 proficiencies which utilize language complexity indices need to rely on both lexical and syntactic complexity measures.

This paper aims to contribute to the methodological toolbox of “pedagogy-driven corpus-based research” (Gabrielatos 2006), that is, research which is situated at the intersection of language description, pedagogical lexicogrammar, and pedagogical materials evaluation (e.g. Harwood 2005; Hunston & Francis 1998; Kennedy 1992; Owen 1993). The contribution of the present paper mainly lies in proposing a method of triangulating the corpus-based evaluation of lexicogrammatical information in EFL coursebooks, by way of examining a relevant corpus sample of learner written output.

The Cambridge Learner Corpus is a 16 million-word corpus of Learner English collected by Cambridge University Press in collaboration with the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (now Cambridge ESOL). It comprises English examination scripts, transcribed retaining all errors, written by learners of English with 86 different mother tongues. The scripts range across 8 EFL examinations and cover both general and business English. A 6 million-word component of the corpus has been error coded to date, using an error-coding system devised at CUP specifically for the Cambridge Learner Corpus. The majority of codes are based on a two-letter system in which the first letter represents the general type of error (e.g. wrong form, omission), while the second letter identifies the word class of the required word. There are 88 possible codes in all. This paper will describe the coding system and the corpus tools used for analysis of the coded corpus, and will demonstrate the benefits which this coding and analysis provides for both lexicographers and writers of other ELT books at CUP. 1. Description of the corpus 1 Since 1993, Cambridge University Press, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (now Cambridge ESOL), has compiled a 16 million-word corpus of Learner English. Students' examination essays are carefully transcribed, reproducing all errors, checked for inputter-generated errors, and stored in the corpus, along with candidate details and examination scores. The corpus is growing all the time. At present, the complete corpus contains more than 16 million words. 86 mother tongues are represented in the corpus, with more than 350,000 words for more than 15 of the mother tongues. The error-coded component of the corpus currently contains 6 million words. A profile of each candidate is given for each examination script. This includes information on the first language, age, sex, education history and years of English study of each student. This information can be used to specify the parameters for the creation of subcorpora. For example, it is possible to isolate for analysis the English of very young learners or a particular examination level, mother tongue or language group. A combination of any of these details can be used to create a subcorpus. 2. The coded corpus 6 million words of the Cambridge Learner Corpus have been error coded to date. While error coding is certainly a laborious and time-consuming task, its benefits for our purposes, which I discuss below, have proved to far outweigh the difficulties. The system of error codes and software have been designed in such a way as to overcome, as far as possible, problems with the indeterminacy of some error types. The corpus has also been manually coded by just two coders, with one coder overseeing the work of the second, thus keeping to a minimum any problems with consistency of tagging. Our aim in coding the corpus is not to create a systematic taxonomy of learner errors but, where possible, to capture under one heading all errors (both of omission and commission) of a particular type so that they can easily be extracted and analyzed and the information gained passed on to examining bodies, teachers, lexicographers, researchers and ELT authors for use in developing tools for learners of English. The codes are not an end in themselves, but rather, act as bookmarks to the contexts in which an error repeatedly occurs. These bookmarks can then be referred to for further analysis. 1 For further information about the Cambridge Learner Corpus, please refer to links at our website:

Corpus Linguistics for Vocabulary provides a practical introduction to using corpus linguistics in vocabulary studies. Using freely available corpus tools, the author provides a step-by-step guide on how corpora can be used to explore key vocabulary-related research questions and topics such as:

The frequency of English words and how to choose which ones should be taught to learners;
How spoken vocabulary differs from written vocabulary, and how academic vocabulary differs from general vocabulary;
How vocabulary contributes to the structure of discourse, and the pragmatic functions it fulfils.
Featuring case studies and tasks throughout, Corpus Linguistics for Vocabulary provides a clear and accessible guide and is essential reading for students and teachers wanting to understand, appreciate and conduct corpus-based research in vocabulary studies.

a review by Rebeca Arndt (2019), published in Language Learning & Technology; https://www.lltjournal.org/item/3118
a review by Long He (2018), published in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics; https://benjamins.com/catalog/ijcl.23.1

The present study investigates the pragmatic marker "you know" in native and learner English. Previous research on "you know" has suggested that it is highly frequent among native speakers but is used much less by non-native speakers, and that the latter do not use it intersubjectively but rather for discourse-organisational purposes. These claims are put to the test in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of four components of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), involving upper-intermediate to advanced Dutch, French, German and Spanish learners of English. Comparisons are made with native discourse as it appears in LINDSEI's reference corpus LOCNEC. Nine functions are attested for "you know" in the corpus, and none of these are restricted to the native corpus. Native and non-native speakers alike use you know in highly intersubjective contexts. The main differences between speaker groups are found in the frequency of use: all learner groups use "you know" consistently less frequently than their native peers, and there are markedly fewer learners in each group who use "you know" at all.

Τα σενάρια που παρουσιάζονται σε αυτό το βιβλίο αποτελούν μια πρόταση για διδακτική αξιοποίηση του Ελληνικού Σώματος Κειμένων Μαθητών (ΕΣΚΕΙΜΑΘ. Παπαδοπούλου & Τάντος 2014, Tantos & Papadopoulou υπό δημοσίευση) από εκπαιδευτικούς των Τάξεων Υποδοχής ή και των μεικτών τάξεων. Το συγκεκριμένο σώμα κειμένων βασίζεται στις γραπτές παραγωγές των κατατακτήριων τεστ «Ας μιλήσουμε Ελληνικά Ι, ΙΙ, ΙΙΙ», που διενεργήθηκαν σε μαθητές που φοιτούσαν σε Τάξεις Υποδοχής. Τα αυθεντικά κείμενα των μαθητών χρησιμοποιήθηκαν ως μια αρκετά αξιόπιστη πηγή για να κατευθύνει τη γλωσσική διδασκαλία στον πληθυσμό-στόχο, δηλαδή τους δίγλωσσους μαθητές.

This LIA International Conference and Cultural Events 2015 proceeding elaborates how a freeware concordancer named  AntConc facilitates teaching and learning of grammar to 21st century learners and it suggests some activities to encourage students' self-discovery and induction of grammar structure

This thesis examines, by way of a corpus-based investigation, usage patterns of modal expressions by British learners of German as a foreign language. Modality plays a pivotal role in all texts and discourses that deal with the discussion or examination of practical or theoretical problems and is crucial for the process of argumentation and reasoning. It is therefore an integral part of foreign language learners‟ writing at university level. The study is more comprehensive than previous approaches, as it incorporates the full semantic range of modal meanings as well as all the different types of modal expressions in the German language, i.e. modal verbs, modal adverbials and modal lexical verbs, modal infinitives and the subjunctive mood. The investigation is methodologically based on a multiple-comparison approach involving a corpus of learner German (CLEG), which has been compiled for the study, and several other L1 and L2 native speaker corpora. The results indicate that learners exhibit in their argumentative writing specific patterns of modality use that are different from those of native speakers and at various levels of proficiency. On the whole, learners tend to overuse modal expressions. The specific overuse and avoidance patterns of epistemic modal verbs are strongly linked to L1/L2 form meaning equivalents (e.g. MUST – MÜSSEN). Where modal verbs are avoided, modal adverbials are overused to fill the semantic gap. Modal adverbials tend to develop into fossilised formulaic sequences, where the expression of modality is extrapolated from the rest of the utterance in a sentence-initial matrix clause, usually of the “es ist...” („it is...‟) type. The development of the use of the subjunctive mood is indicative of the learners‟ growing proficiency; however, learners even at the advanced stage exhibit difficulties in the morphological distinction between indicative and subjunctive verb forms. On top of these findings on learner modality, the results from this study can corroborate previous research on general characteristics of learner language, specifically the tendency to be more explicit than native speakers, to overuse personalised expressions that indicate subjective writer involvement, and to exhibit a less formal, more speech-like register in the learners‟ written argumentative productions.

Corpora have been used in English as a foreign language materials for decades, and native corpora have been present in the classroom by means of direct approaches such as Data-Driven Learning (Johns, T., and P. King 1991. ‘Should you be Persuaded’- Two Samples of Data-Driven Learning Materials. In Classroom Concordancing, 1–16. Birmingham University. English Language Research Journal 4.). However, the suitability of using learners’ output in classroom tasks remains controversial. This paper describes a pilot study in the application of a non-standard direct approach where Spanish university students are invited to reflect on their production. In the experiment, carried out in several sessions during the course, the students were exposed to a selection of erroneous sentences from their compositions. Prior to the classroom activity, the teacher contrasted the learners’ sentences with correct versions produced by native English speakers. A relevant part of the methodology consisted in getting learners collectively involved in finding the errors and suggesting improvements. After that, solutions were discussed through the analysis of the alternative sentences provided by the native students. The results show that students are willing to accept this methodology as a supplement to textbooks’ proposals. We claim that authentic and highly specific learner data obtained from a reliable ad hoc learner corpus and direct exposure to these data through controlled activities may cover certain learners’ needs not found in textbooks.

The fact that second-language (L2) learners have problems with collocation is widely attested. However, few studies have investigated the development of L2 collocational knowledge longitudinally. Fewer still have employed more than a handful of participants. In addition, almost all studies to date have looked at advanced learners of English. Other L2 proficiencies and backgrounds have, by and large, been disregarded. The lacuna left by this paucity motivated the present study. Thirty-six Chinese beginner learners of Italian wrote a composition at the beginning (Level 1), in the middle (Level 2), and at the end (Level 3) of an intensive course. A small corpus of L2 Italian was compiled with the aim of investigating N + Adj combinations. Analyses revealed that the number of combinations at the beginning and at the end of the course was comparable; the number of higher frequency items, however, was greater in Level 3 compositions than Level 1 compositions. Importantly,
analyses showed an increase in strongly associated collocations in Level 3 writings compared to Level 1 writings. Thus, Level 3 compositions contained not only more higher frequency combinations, but also more strongly associated collocations than did Level 1 compositions. Taken together, the study provides new insights into the development of L2 collocational competence.

This article reports research investigating instances of linguistic metaphor in contextualized corpus data. Since the issue of metaphor identification in naturally-occurring data has been reason of current debate among cognitive and applied linguists, this paper focuses particularly on the process of identification of this type of language in corpus data and proposes a combined procedure for metaphor identification. The findings inform about the presence and word class of metaphorical language in the argumentative writing of EFL university students. Implications and directions for future research are highlighted. Resumen Este artículo reporta un estudio de instancias de lenguaje metafórico en datos contextualizados enmarcados en la lingüística del corpus. Dado que el problema de la identificación del lenguaje metafórico se ha constituido como causa de debate entre estudiosos de la lingüística cognitiva y la lingüística aplicada, este artículo se enfoca principalmente en los procesos de identificación de este tipo de lenguaje en datos auténticos de corpus, y propone un procedimiento combinado aplicable a este tipo de análisis. Los resultados informan acerca de la presencia del lenguaje metafórico y su clasificación gramatical en textos argumentativos escritos por estudiantes universitarios de inglés como lengua extranjera. El artículo discute las implicaciones de este estudio y propone posibles direcciones para futuras investigaciones. Palabras clave Metáfora lingüística, lingüística del corpus, procedimientos de identificación de metáfora, producción metafórica de estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera.

The present study is a corpus-based investigation of modality in three 100,000- word corpora of argumentative essays written in English by American, Filipino and Spanish university students. Concordances were used to determine the overall range and frequency of some modal expressions and analyze their grammatical distribution, their function as hedges and boosters, and their use in personalized, impersonalized and depersonalized constructions and in modal combinations. The analysis revealed that while the Filipino student writers tended towards hyperclarity, the Spanish foreign-language learners’ texts seemed to transfer Spanish rhetorical strategies to English. Both non-native groups overused personalized forms and had difficulty establishing appropriate author distance through impersonalized constructions. All three groups appeared to rely heavily on modal verbs and adverbs, to the detriment of lexical verbs, adjectives and nouns. Spoken-language features and inappropriate degrees of author commitment were also detected in all texts. The characteristics shared by the native and non-native subjects support the hypothesis that problems with the expression of modality in academic writing may not only be due to language- learning factors but to novice-writer factors as well. The paper concludes with recommendations for the teaching of modality in second and foreign-language writing.

Man is bound to make mistakes. Language learning is totally a process of trial and error. As language
errors  are  the  topic  of  this  paper,  let  us  provisionally  define  language  errors  first  as  an  unsuccessful  bit  of
language. Though errors were considered a sin in the past, now the linguists stress the importance of  learners’
errors. These errors are helpful to teachers, researchers, and learners themselves (Corder 1967). Error analysis is
the process  that determines the incidences,  nature,causes  and consequences of the  unsuccessful  language i.e.
errors. Keeping in mind the recent trends in language teaching, studying learners’ output is important to define
the parameters of learning second language.
The  present  corpus  based  work  intends  to  find  errors  made  by  Pakistani  learners  of  English  at
graduation level, when their production is in written form. The learner corpus used for this research  Pakistani
component of ICLE (International Centre for Learner English). It contains 0.2 million words in total, written in
the form of argumentative essays, by the learners of English at the graduation level and is POS tagged using
CLAWS7 POS tagger.

This paper adopts the Integrated Contrastive Model (Granger 1996) to an examination of the use of articles in the L2 English written production of L1 speakers of three article-less languages (Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Thai) across four L2 proficiency levels. Data is sourced from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE; Ishikawa 2011, 2013), comprising 575 written essays totalling 125,588 words across two writing prompts. Accuracy of zero, indefinite and definite articles is measured using Pica's (1983) Target Language Use across Bickerton's (1981) semantic/pragmatic article contexts (generic, specific definite, specific indefinite and non-specific indefinite). The results show two different orders of article accuracy depending on L1 background, as well as effects of writing prompt on the accuracy of certain article forms, and evidence of pseudo-longitudinal development for particular article usages as L2 proficiency increases, although not in all cases. Massive overproduction of indefinite/ definite articles in generic contexts is problematic for all three L2 groups regardless of L1 background and L2 proficiency. However, Mandarin L2 English users appear to enjoy a significant advantage in L2 article accuracy over Korean or Thai L2 English users in almost all contexts of use and L2 proficiency levels, providing further potential evidence that the often reported grammaticalisation of definiteness/specificity markers in L1 Mandarin is aiding Mandarin L2 English users' acquisition of the English article system.

Major obstacles to achieving high levels of reliability (and by extension validity) of error annotation of learner corpora range from defining errors in general, the lack of an error
taxonomy sufficiently applicable in corpus annotation, insufficiencies of any set linguistic norm as background for tagging, to the lack of well-defined measurements of quality of annotation. The paper first looks at the theoretical issues behind the definition of an error. It expands the discussion by focusing on a more practically applicable account of errors
aimed at error annotation. It goes on to offer a more robust error taxonomy which could help address issues of interpretability inherent in linguistic categorization and could
ensure more consistency. In the end, the paper suggests an alternative definition of an error applicable for corpus annotation, based on inter-annotator agreement and aimed at being the primary indicator of validity.

The ability to express qualification and certainty is central to academic writing in English and fulfils an important pragmatic function in many types of written discourse, because it contributes to building writer-reader relationships . This study uses corpus analysis to investigate how one group of Italian undergraduate students express qualification and certainty in their writing. The findings show that, in common with previous studies of L2 writers (Hyland & Milton, 1997), this student  population relies on a small pool of modal verbs,  overuses informal devices  typical of spoken discourse, and tends to overstate their commitment to propositions. It concludes by discussing implications for second language writing pedagogy.

This article deals with the place of learner corpora, i.e. corpora containing authentic language data produced by learners of a foreign/second language, in English for academic purposes (EAP) pedagogy and sets out to demonstrate that they have a valuable contribution to make to the field. Following an initial brief introduction to corpus-based analyses of academic writing, the article zooms in on learner corpora, describing some of the findings that emerge from corpus studies of L2 learners’ EAP writing. The next section examines the use of corpora in EAP materials design and shows that the few existing corpus-informed EAP tools tend to be based on native corpora only. The article then reports on a collaborative corpus-based project between the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (Université catholique de Louvain) and Macmillan Education, which aims to describe a number of rhetorical functions particularly prominent in academic writing. The analysis of learner corpus data and their comparison with data from native corpora have highlighted a number of problems which non-native learners experience when writing academic essays, e.g., lack of register awareness, phraseological infelicities, and semantic misuse. In this article, we illustrate how these findings were used to inform a 30-page academic writing section in the second edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.

يهدف البحث إلى التعريف بـ"المدونات اللغوية لمتعلمي اللغة العربية"Arabic Learner) Corpora)، مع استعراض ما هو متاح منها، وكذلك التعريف بأهم مجالات استخدامها، سواء في الجانب العلمي كأبحاث تعلُّم واكتساب اللغة، أو في الجانب التعليمي كبناء المعاجم الطلابية، وتصميم المواد التعليمية. كما يلخص البحث أهم المعايير التي ينبغي أخذها في الاعتبار عند تصميم مدونة طلابية، بدءاً من اختيار العينة التمثيلية للمدونة من طلاب ونصوص، ومروراً بالمنهجية المتبعة لجمع مواد المدونة، ثم انتهاءً بمنهجية الترميز والتحليل. يتطرق المقال سريعاً إلى التعريف بمشروع بحثي حول تصميم مدونة لغوية لمتعلمي اللغة العربية في المملكة العربية السعودية، قبل أن يختم بحديث مفصل عن نظامٍ مقترحٍ لترميز الأخطاء في المدونات الطلابية، مع الشرح والتمثيل لأسلوب استخدامه، ومن ثم مقارنته بتصنيف آخر في هذا المجال (أبو حكيمة ومن معه 2008، و2009)، والتي ظهر من خلالها دقة وشمولية التصنيف المقترح، وملاءمته لترميز الأخطاء في المدونات الطلابية، مع أهمية العمل على تطويره وتحسين جودته.

This study aims to provide the first empirical assessment of quantitative research methods and study quality in learner corpus research. We systematically review quantitative primary studies referenced in the Learner Corpus Bibliography (LCB), a representative bibliography of learner corpus research maintained by the Learner Corpus Association which contained 1,276 references when the project started. Each primary study in the LCB was coded for over 50 categories representing six dimensions: (a) publication type (i.e. conference paper, book chapter, journal article), (b) research focus (e.g. lexis, grammar), (c) methodological features (e.g. keyword analysis, error analysis, use of reference corpus), (d) statistical analyses (e.g. X², t-test, regression analysis), and (e) reporting practices (e.g. reliability coefficients, means). Results point to several systematic strengths as well as many flaws, such as the absence of research questions, incomplete and inconsistent reporting practices (e.g. means without standard deviations), and lack of statistical literacy (i.e. LCR studies generally overrely on tests of statistical significance, do not report effect sizes, rarely check or report whether statistical assumptions have been met, rarely use multivariate analyses). Improvements over time are however clearly noted and there are signs that, like other related disciplines, learner corpus research is slowing undergoing a methodological reform.

Corpus linguistics is a new branch of linguistics but its status is still debatable-either as a theory or a methodology. This article aims to give an overview of the different approaches and perspectives of corpus linguistics. The neo-Firthians contend that corpus linguistics is a method, while other prominent corpus linguists claim that it is a theory. Other corpus linguists believe that corpus linguistics can be both a methodology as well as a theory depending on the extent and purposes it is used for. The applicability of corpus linguistics as a methodology is observed in English Language Teaching and Learning (ELT). Learner corpora are used extensively in second language pedagogy and research as either direct approach involving Data-Driven Learning (DDL) where students participated as researchers and worked directly with corpora or indirect approach where corpus is used as a research method in producing dictionaries, syllabuses, textbooks, and teaching materials.

The pragmatic marker 'well' has received a lot of attention in studies on native speaker discourse and has served as an interesting testing ground for theories accounting for the multifunctionality of pragmatic markers. In the rapidly expanding body of research on pragmatic markers in learner English 'well' has also claimed a prominent position, but so far no comparison has been made of how learners of varying mother tongue backgrounds use 'well'. This article offers a Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (cf. Granger 1996) in scrutinising well as a pragmatic marker in the Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Chinese components of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and comparing these results with Aijmer’s (2011) findings for the Swedish component of LINDSEI and a comparable native speaker corpus. 'Well' is shown to be more prevalent overall in each of the learner corpora than in the native corpus, except for the Chinese (in which 'well' displays a marginal incidence). This overall discrepancy between the learners and native speakers only holds for the speech management functions of well; its attitudinal functions are significantly less common in the learners’ discourse than in the native speakers’. The observed differences are attributed to a complex interplay of factors, involving a.o. the learners’ limited inventory of pragmatic markers, their extensive exposure to 'well', L1 interference, and the speech context.

Language testing guidelines like the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) have been very influential for language testing and assessment, yet the way they define proficiency levels using ‘can-do-statements’ has often been criticized as being too vague. In the present paper, I will take a corpus-based approach towards spoken accuracy in advanced German learner English and report on the findings of an error analysis of the most error-prone category in the German component of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI). Focusing on verb-tense related errors, the present study not only reveals what is especially error-prone in the case of advanced German learners of English in this category (e.g. reported speech, conditionals), but it also shows that even at an advanced level, learners appear to form a fairly heterogeneous group with regard to the number of errors. However, the types of errors committed at this proficiency level are quite systematic, and this allows for a thorough description of advanced learners’ error profiles. In the final section of this paper, I will take these findings to suggest a text-centred description of different proficiency levels in advanced German learners’ speech at the university level and sketch out some avenues for future research.

This dissertation presents a cross-sectional study of coherence of reference to person by Chinese and Korean adults learning English as a foreign language.  The study focuses on universal and language-specific constraints on reference management in three native language groups (English, Mandarin and Korean) and the acquisition of reference management in L2 English.  Two pilot studies featuring written corpus data (from the Cambridge Learner Corpus, Nicholls, 2003) and oral production data led to the design of the present study, where a controlled picture sequence was used to elicit both native and L2 oral production data totalling 178 narratives.  The cross-section of proficiencies surveyed ranges from levels A1 (Basic User) to C2 (Proficient User) of the Common European Framework of Reference (Council of Europe, 2001).
The findings suggest that while learners at lower L2 proficiency levels were generally able to produce a complete discourse, coherence of reference management is not fully acquired until Intermediate User levels. ‘Basic-variety’-like reference (characterised by the use of zero anaphora outside of the L2 distribution, and a lack of third-person pronouns) was attested in the lower proficiency L2 data similar to the data reported in Klein & Perdue (1992, 1997). At intermediate levels, variation in the acquisition of certain form/function relationships was attested between the L2 groups, as predicted by a set of Complex Adaptive System Principles (CASP) (Filipovic & Hawkins, 2013) that consider the impact of L1 transfer, input frequency, and complexity of L2 form/function relationships on L2 acquisition.  In particular, the configuration of the L1 grammar played an important role in the relative speed of L2 acquisition, in favour of the Mandarin L2 English group. However, even at higher L2 proficiencies (C1/C2) certain other idiosyncrasies (particularly over-explicitness in L2 production) were potential barriers to the 'ultimate attainment' of L2 reference before or at the highest CEFR level (C2). The findings have implications for if, when, and how learners of an L2 can produce coherent discourse in the L2, and why L2 learners from particular source language backgrounds might struggle to acquire certain features of coherence in the L2 compared to other features.

This collection sheds light on the ways in which corpus linguistics and the use of learner corpora might be applied to the study of academic discourse, revealing linguistic and rhetorical patterns and insights into variation across a range of disciplinary genres. Organized into three sections, the book highlights key tools and methodologies in corpus analysis to study such features as discourse markers, lexical bundles, linguistic complexity, lexico-grammatical conventions, and modality in case studies in studies of academic discourse, both in a second language and in English for specific purposes. The volume features examples from disciplinary genres not often covered in the existing literature, including MA theses, academic book reviews, and online student forums. Taken together with the study of learner corpora, the book demonstrates the impact of corpus linguistic tools in better understanding linguistic patterns of specific languages and language use and in turn, their role in helping to identify the needs of language learners. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, and English for Specific Purposes.

Learner corpora, or searchable collections of the written or spoken production of language learners, have become increasingly vital in the field of applied linguistics.  As advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing have allowed for the automatic or semi-automatic parsing, tagging and coding of large chunks of learner-produced text, there is increasing interest in the analysis of large-scale corpora of many millions of words, collected from a broad range of linguistic tasks, language backgrounds, and learner proficiencies.  As language teachers, we set our students a wide range of written and spoken tasks that, after completion, are forgotten about or deleted when the term ends.  In doing so, the opportunity to compare and actually describe what your students can (and cannot) do linguistically in quantifiable terms is wasted, and a valuable resource for shaping future curricula, lesson planning and assessments is lost.  This short ‘idea’ paper will outline some of the interesting work currently being undertaken by those working on learner corpora, how language educators can build their own learner corpora, and how the application of the findings from learner data can be used to build a detailed profile of the learners in your institution.