Description

Learner corpora are electronic collections of texts produced by foreign/second language learners. This relatively new resource has a lot to offer both to theoreticians interested in the process of second language acquisition and to practitioners keen to produce more efficient teaching and learning tools and classroom methodologies.

Over the last few years, learner corpus research has become increasingly popular, as witnessed by the numerous learner corpora that are being collected and analysed internationally by academics and publishers. Yet, the field presents a number of challenges, not only in terms of corpus design and annotation, but also with respect to the analysis and interpretation of the data. While researchers can rely to a large extent on the methods and tools developed by corpus linguists working on native data, they need to be aware that learner corpora are special corpora, which differ in significant ways from native corpora and therefore call for their own methods of analysis and software tools.

The aim of the Summer School is to introduce learner corpus research through a series of lectures, workshops and hands-on sessions, and to show how the challenges it presents can be met. It is intended both for researchers who have recently embarked on a learner corpus project and those who simply want to know more about this exciting field of research.

Course Director: Professor Sylviane Granger, Director of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics

Tutors: Sylvie De Cock, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Sylviane Granger and Fanny Meunier

With the collaboration of: Christelle Cosme, Céline Gouverneur, Claire Hugon, Marie-Aude Lefer, Magali Paquot and Jennifer Thewissen

All the tutors and collaborators are attached to the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at the University of Louvain which coordinates two international learner corpus projects: the International Corpus of Learner English and the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage.

Language of instruction: English

Number of participants: c. 30

Venue: University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (30 km south of Brussels, direct train connection)
- French version
- English version

Topics covered in the lectures:

Workshops and hands-on sessions

Individual guidance on personal learner corpus project

The detailed programme can be downloaded here.

Colloquium:

On the first day of the Summer School, there will be a learner corpus colloquium where all the participants will have the opportunity to give a brief presentation of their (planned or finished) research.

Schedule

9.15 am – 12.15 pm
1.30 pm – 4.30 pm

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Web design by Christelle Cosme
July 2007