Corpora: overuse and underuse of learner English

[Eric Atwell]

>I am making a contrastive study of learner English and NS learner
>English.

I dont understand what you mean by "NS learner English" - do you mean
English of young children?  If you want access to a corpus of young
children's spoken English, try Polytechnic of Wales Corpus, see ICAME
website: http://www.hd.uib.no/icame/newcd.htm for what's on ICAME CD,
http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/pow.htm for POW corpus manual

Another thought - I recently attended a "European Year of Languages"
symposium in Krakow, Poland, organised by British Council and others;
a consensus emerged that English has become the international lingua
franca of Europe, and is no longer "owned" by native speakers, it is
common property of the European (and international) community.
So, the International English of a Polish speaker at this conference
should have equal "status" to the English used by native speakers.
Maybe there is scope for a European Corpus of English parallel to the
British National Corpus, where an object of study might be not "what are
the deficiencies of learner Engish" but "what are the regional/national
variations in English as written/spoken across Europe".

Is your study in this vein?

Eric Atwell

--
Eric Atwell, Distributed Multimedia Systems MSc Tutor & SOCRATES Tutor
School of Computing, University of Leeds, LEEDS LS2 9JT
TEL: 0113-2335430  MOBILE: 0775-1039104 FAX: 0113-2335468
WWW: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric  EMAIL: eric at comp.leeds.ac.uk