Computer Learner Corpora

How can one study the process of learning a foreign language? Computer learner corpora are a new and powerful resource to observe learner language. They are representative collections of learners’ written or spoken productions in electronic form. Such data can be studied by means of specific software to obtain information on learner interlanguage (e.g. misuse, overuse or underuse in relation to a native reference norm) on a larger scale and in a more systematic and reliable way than through manual search or teacher intuition. Computer learner corpora are the most recent product of the flourishing field of computer corpus linguistics. The story of the development of this empirical approach to the study of language since the 1960s, and in particular its initially rather slow appearance in Italy, as well as its advantages and drawbacks, are described in the first part of the volume. The second part focuses on two European learner corpora projects, i.e. “The International Corpus of Learner English , ICLE”, a corpus of advanced academic essays in English and the “Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage, LINDSEI”, a corpus of informal academic interviews with advanced students of English. The research contained in this volume covers the productions of Italian advanced EFL learners mainly in the following areas: verb contractions, the lexical field of “work”, cleft sentences, logical connectors, rhetorical questions, discourse markers and differences between the spoken and the written register. This book will be of interest to linguists and future specialists in English who wish to become familiar with the methodology of corpus linguistics in order to explore the interlanguage of Italian advanced learners of English for descriptive or teaching/learning purposes.