Corpora: overuse and underuse of learner English

[yorick wilks]

There are many statistical studies around of the spelling and grammatical
errors in English associated with specific first language competences---e.g.
the the English errors Poles typically make as contrasted with those of the
French (lack of articles etc.) These were done so as to produce
grammar/speeling correctors for particular markets and may well be what Eric
Attwell was referring to---a search of the CL/NLP literature would soon find
them.

Whether these studies support the claim of Erics's Polish chum, that his
cluster of errors now have equal status with native English competence is a
different and wholly non-linguisic question. That there is an international
English is beyond question as a social fact, and native Engish speakers are
often poor speakers of it, unsurprisingly. The problem of its status will
have to be settle by its own Academy who will also have to decide which
particular cluster of distinctive errors will have to have primacy over the
others in its definition.
Yorick Wilks


On Wed, 12 Dec 2001 10:19:18 +0000 (GMT), Eric Atwell wrote:

>
>  >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
>
>
>





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