English learner corpora and research in Korea

Abstract

The interest in the exploitation of corpora in the study of Korean L2 learners’ use of English has risen dramatically over the past two decades, leading to the compilation of learner corpora and to numerous empirical investigations into Korean learners’ use of English. This paper will give an overview of the compilation and characteristics of English learner corpora in Korea and will also provide an analysis of the recent trends in learner corpus research. It was not until the mid-2000s that Korean academics started to compile English learner corpora, such as the snu Korean-speaking English Learner Corpus (skelc), the Yonsei English Learner Corpus (yelc), the Gachon Learner Corpus (glc), the Neungyule Interlanguage Corpus of Korean Learners of English (nickle), the efl Teacher Corpus (etc), the Korean English Learners’ Spoken Corpus (kelsc) and the ets Corpus of Non-native Written English (TOEFL11). There have also been a growing number of learner corpus-based studies that used the existing learner corpora as well as self-compiled corpus data. All the learner corpus-based research articles published in two Korean academic journals ( English Teaching and Korean Journal of Applied Linguistics) will be reviewed and analysed in terms of research topics and areas, data types, analysis methods and corpus compilation practices. Finally, this paper will suggest some future directions for learner corpus compilation and research in Korea.