Learner Corpora in Foreign Language Education

Abstract

Analyzing learner language is a key component of second and foreign language education research and serves two main purposes: it helps researchers gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of second language acquisition (SLA) and it is a useful source of data for practitioners who are keen to design teaching and learning tools that target learners' attested difficulties. The learner corpus (LC) is a new resource that is currently bringing learner language back into focus and is enjoying growing interest from the language education community at large. It first emerged as a branch of corpus linguistics in the late 1980s but is only now beginning to attract significant attention from L2 theoreticians and practitioners. This chapter aims to highlight the relevance of learner corpora to the field of language education. The next section gives an overview of the main defining features of this new resource and some of the dimensions along which they can be classified. The section "Work in Progress" is devoted to methods of analysis: contrastive interlanguage analysis and automated analysis. "Problems and Difficulties: Pedagogical Applications" presents some of the main pedagogical applications of learner corpus research, and the final section suggests some possible avenues for future research.