Twenty Years of Learner Corpus Research. Looking Back, Moving Ahead

Katherine ACKERLEY
A comparison of learner and native speaker writing in online self-
presentations:
_Pedagogical applications_

This paper investigates the language used by both learners and native speakers
of English when introducing themselves to peers in an online community, and
then goes on to discuss the pedagogical potential of the findings. A small
corpus of self-presentations written by 220 first-year students majoring in
English at an Italian university was compiled during the 2009-2010 academic
year. The learner corpus was compared with a reference corpus consisting of
self-presentations produced by native speaker students in higher education in
English-speaking countries and posted on online forums. The paper first
considers why it is important that language majors aim to write in a way that
is appropriate to a given genre, rather than merely focusing on morpho-
syntactic accuracy. It then focuses on aspects of divergence between learner
and native speaker production, presenting some of the linguistic choices made
by learners when presenting themselves to peers. It goes on to discuss how the
creation of awareness-raising materials based on the analysis can enhance
learning by directing students' attention towards the differences between
their texts and those of native speaker students.

Theodora ALEXOPOULOU, Helen YANNAKOUDAKIS & Angeliki SALAMOURA
_Classifying intermediate learner English: A data-driven approach to learner_
_ _corpora__

We demonstrate how data-driven approaches to learner corpora can support
Second Language Acquisition research when integrated with visualisation tools.
We employ a visual user interface supporting the investigation of a set of
automatically determined features discriminating between pass and fail First
Certificate in English (FCE) exam scripts. We illustrate how the interface can
support the investigation of individual features. The analysis of the most
discriminative features indicates that the development of grammatical
categories allowing reference to complex events, referents and discourse
relations is a crucial property of the upper-intermediate level.

Margit BRECKLE & Heike ZINSMEISTER
_L1 transfer versus fixed chunks: A learner corpus-based study of L2 German_

This study deals with the question of what strategies Chinese L2 learners of
German follow when starting a declarative sentence in German. The
investigation is based on the ALeSKo corpus, a linguistically annotated
learner corpus of written German. In previous studies, we observed that the L2
texts show a significant overuse of sentences that start with an information-
structural function in comparison to comparable L1 texts. In this paper, we
pursue an alternative line of explanation that explores whether the observed
difference is due to an overuse of chunks in the L2 texts. We perform a chunk
classification and also automatically detect all material copied from the
title and the task description – a particular type of chunk. Our findings
indicate that although L2 learners use chunks to a substantial degree, an
overuse with respect to the beginnings of the sentences could not be
confirmed.

Julian BROOKE & Graeme HIRST
_Native language detection with 'cheap’ learner corpora_

We begin by showing that the best publicly available, multiple-L1 learner
corpus, the _International Corpus of Learner English_ (Granger _et al._ 2009),
has issues when used directly for the task of native language detection (NLD).
The topic biases in the corpus are a confounding factor that results in cross-
validated performance that appears misleadingly high, for all the feature
types which are traditionally used. Our approach here is to look for other,
cheap ways to get training data for NLD. To that end, we present the web-
scraped Lang-8 learner corpus, and show that it is useful for the task,
particularly if large quantities of data are used. This also seems to
facilitate the use of lexical features, which have been previously avoided. We
also investigate ways to do NLD that do not involve having learner corpora at
all, including double-translation and extracting information from L1 corpora
directly. All of these avenues are shown to be promising.

Marcus CALLIES & Ekaterina ZAYTSEVA
_The Corpus of Academic Learner English (CALE) – A new resource for the study
and assessment of advanced language proficiency_

This paper introduces the Corpus of Academic Learner English (CALE), a
Language for Specific Purposes learner corpus that is currently being compiled
for the quantitative and qualitative study of advanced learners' written
academic English. CALE is designed to comprise seven academic genres produced
by learners of English as a foreign language in a university setting and thus
contains discipline- and genre-specific texts. The corpus will serve as an
empirical basis to produce detailed case studies that examine linguistic
determinants of lexico-grammatical variation, i.e. semantic, structural,
discourse-motivated and processing-related factors that influence constituent
order and the choice of structural variants, but also those that are
potentially more specific to the acquisition of L2 academic writing such as
task setting, genre and writing proficiency. Another major goal is to develop
a set of linguistic criteria for the assessment of advanced proficiency
conceived of as "sophisticated language use in context".

Erik CASTELLO
_Integrating learner corpus data into the assessment of spoken interaction in
English in an Italian university context_

This paper reports on ongoing research conducted at the University of Padua on
the teaching and assessment of spoken interaction in English at level B2 of
the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of
Europe 2001). The study is mainly based on a small learner corpus (about
18,000 words) composed of transcripts of interactions between second-year
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students recorded during assessment
sessions. It presents the context of the interactions, the corpora used and
the results of a series of investigations carried out into some pragmatic
aspects of the interactions. The paper then explores how these findings can
help us to flesh out the construct for ‘Discourse Management’ and, ultimately,
to set more reliable scoring criteria.

Evelyne CAUVIN
_Intonational phrasing as a potential indicator for establishing prosodic
learner profiles_

Prosodic profiles have been extensively used in forensics and language
pathology. However, they are rarely used in second language acquisition as
yet. The aim of this paper is to show how prosody can be used to define
learner profiles, possibly their learning styles and their different cognitive
abilities. It is our claim that different segmentation modes of utterances
define different prosodic learner profiles and we aim to characterise these.
We will show that prosodic profiles of French learners of English can be drawn
on the basis of phrasing and that a cluster of prosodic properties
corroborates this typology. Our analysis is first based on read speech and the
subsequent classifications on recorded interviews of the same speakers. It
reveals the limitations in the assessment phonological criteria the Common
European Framework of Reference for Languages ( _CEFRL)_ (Council of Europe
2001) advocates and makes a good case for reconsidering them.

Meilin CHEN
_ _Phrasal verbs in a longitudinal learner corpus: Quantitative findings__

This study analyses Chinese learners’ use of phrasal verbs from a longitudinal
perspective. Through a comparison of the learners’ output of phrasal verbs
with that of two groups of native English speakers (American university
students and British secondary school leavers), Chinese learners were found to
be capable of producing an adequate number of phrasal verbs. Yet, they did not
demonstrate appropriate choice of phrasal verbs. The longitudinal data reveal
that the learners’ acquisition of phrasal verbs during their three years of
study was not always linear. A considerable decrease in the number of phrasal
verbs used in the students’ writing in the...