The International Corpus of Learner English: A New Resource for Foreign Language Learning and Teaching and Second Language Acquisition Research

Abstract

N In the late 1950s, when corpus linguistics made its debut on the linguistic scene, it was a very modest enterprise in the hands of a small group of enthusiasts. Looking back on this period, Leech (1991), one of the pioneers of corpus linguistics, recalls that years, corpus linguistics was the obsession of a small group which received little or no recognition from either linguistics or computer science (p. 25). Since that time, the group of enthusiasts has grown considerably and corpus linguistics has progressively infiltrated most-if not all-language-related disciplines. One of its major contributions has been in the field of variation studies. The diversification of corpora has given linguists a firm basis for comparing language varieties distinguished in terms of the medium (spoken vs. written), the field (general vs. specialized), and geographical status (World Englishes). For years, foreign/second language learner varieties remained conspicuously absent from corpus-based research. Only in the early 1990s did publishers and academics-concurrently but independently--start collecting and analyzing learner data. Two learner English corpora originated in that early period: the Longman Learners' Corpus (see Longman Corpus Network, 2003) and the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; see Granger, n.d.). As the latter is now being made available to the academic community (Granger, Dagneaux, & Meunier, 2002), it seems only fitting to describe the corpus in detail and, more importantly, to highlight the benefits it offers ESOL researchers and teachers.