The International Corpus of English project: A progress report

Abstract

This article begins by introducing the International Corpus of English project and proceeds to summarize the findings and outcomes of an extensive review by written questionnaire conducted by the present authors (Kirk & Nelson, 2017). Although critically concerned with practice hitherto, the review also discusses possible second generation components, and the issues in need of addressing before they should begin. The report contains many comments from a questionnaire that respondents complete, giving a flavour of the importance with which the corpus is valued. Respondents also raise a number of fundamental questions about the nature of L2 varieties of English in multilingual contexts. An Appendix sets out a prospectus for a possible component of electronic texts. Other Appendices list the corpus's text categories and their quantities as well as the 27 national components and their directors.