Current perspectives on Learner Corpus Research

Abstract

Learner Corpus Research (LCR) is a relative newcomer to the scene of research paradigms and methodologies within applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research. In addition to other types of data that have traditionally been used in SLA research, learner corpora provide large-scale principled collections of authentic, continuous and contextualized language use by foreign/second language (L2) learners that are stored in electronic format. They enable the systematic and (semi-)automatic extraction, visualization and analysis of large amounts of learner data in a way that was not possible before. Access to and analysis of learner corpus data is greatly facilitated by the digital medium, and the sheer quantity of data can help to explore SLA phenomena from non-experimental perspectives (Callies 2015). Although the majority of learner corpora may appear relatively small in size when compared to large reference corpora of several major European languages that comprise billions of words of text, they contain datasets for general use that are still many times larger than the oftentimes narrow(er) datasets collected in SLA research through more strictly controlled elicitation techniques. LCR as a field only emerged and became visible at the turn of the 1990s in the context of the popularization of corpus linguistics at large, but has rapidly evolved and grown in scope and sophistication over the past three to four decades. It now bears all signs of an established discipline: it has an academic journal, the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, that has been publishing studies in LCR since 2013; two handbooks that survey the field and its links to the major neighbouring disciplines of corpus linguistics, SLA and language teaching (Granger, Gilquin and Meunier, eds., 2015; Tracy-Ventura and Paquot, eds., 2021); and a biennial, international conference that has been organised since 2011 under the aegis of the field’s own professional organisation, the Learner Corpus Association, officially founded in 2013. Because of its origin, LCR has initially been a relatively European-centred research field but has in the meantime made significant inroads into North America, South Africa (van Rooy 2019) and the Asia-Pacific region (Jung 2022). It is by now a vibrant and growing international community. This paper provides some perspectives on recent and current achievements and developments in the field, highlights several new trends and initiatives, but also discusses some challenges. The focus will be on LCR and the study of learner English.