Twenty years of learner corpus research: looking back, moving ahead

Abstract

Learner corpus research is a young but vibrant new brand of research which stands at a crossroads between corpus linguistics, second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. Its origins go back to the late 1980s when academics and publishers started collecting data from foreign/second language learners with a view to advancing our understanding of the mechanisms of second language acquisition and/or developing pedagogical tools and methods that more accurately target the needs of language learners. At first limited to English as a Foreign Language, learner corpus research has begun to spread to a wide range of languages and as a result, the community group of learner corpus researchers is rapidly growing and diversifying. The First Learner Corpus Research Conference organized by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics of the Université catholique de Louvain in September 2011 aimed to take stock of the advances made in the field in its over twenty years of existence. The resulting proceedings volume covers issues of learner corpus design, collection and annotation and contains reports on various aspects of (written and spoken) learner interlanguage – pronunciation, prosody, grammar, lexis, phraseology and discourse – as well as design of learner-corpus-informed tools. The volume also explores some of the ways in which learner corpus\nresearch could develop in the near future.

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