Learner corpora: The missing link in EAP pedagogy

Abstract

This article deals with the place of learner corpora, i.e. corpora containing authentic language data produced by learners of a foreign/second language, in English for academic purposes (EAP) pedagogy and sets out to demonstrate that they have a valuable contribution to make to the field. Following an initial brief introduction to corpus-based analyses of academic writing, the article zooms in on learner corpora, describing some of the findings that emerge from corpus studies of L2 learners’ EAP writing. The next section examines the use of corpora in EAP materials design and shows that the few existing corpus-informed EAP tools tend to be based on native corpora only. The article then reports on a collaborative corpus-based project between the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (Université catholique de Louvain) and Macmillan Education, which aims to describe a number of rhetorical functions particularly prominent in academic writing. The analysis of learner corpus data and their comparison with data from native corpora have highlighted a number of problems which non-native learners experience when writing academic essays, e.g., lack of register awareness, phraseological infelicities, and semantic misuse. In this article, we illustrate how these findings were used to inform a 30-page academic writing section in the second edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.