Corpora: Learner Corpora

[Nadja Nesselhauf]

Hanelle,

Dave Willis (e.g. in The Lexical Syllabus 1990) calls a corpus designed to
help learners by including the type of language they need to acquire a
"learner's corpus". This term is not widely used, however, and is a bit
unfortunate owing to its similarity to "learner corpus", which has become a
fairly established term (for a corpus of learner language, as you said). If
you actually creating such a corpus (i.e. a systematic collection of
scientific texts written by native speakers) and are not merely looking for
a collection of uses of scientific terms as Eric Atwell suggested, and would
like information on how to best use a self-made small ESP corpus in the
classroom, you might want to have a look at Ma, Bruce, Learning strategies
in ESP classroom concordancing: an initial investigation into data-driven
learning; In Flowerdew /Tong 1994, Entering Text (Hong Kong: University of
Secience and Technology).

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Nadja Nesselhauf


Nadja Nesselhauf
Dep't of English
University of Basel
Switzerland

----- Original Message -----
From: Fourie H Me <HFOURIE at sun.ac.za>
To: <CORPORA at HD.UIB.NO>
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 12:49 PM
Subject: Corpora: Learner Corpora


> Dear all,
>
> I am involved in a research project that is trying to establish a learner
> corpus for first year students in the Science Faculty.  Here's the catch:
> for lack of a better word, I use "learner corpus" to refer to a corpus of
> scientific terms and their use, in English, for students whose home
language
> is not English and who therefore need some help to use these terms
> efficiently for their studies.  A web-search shows that "learner corpora"
is
> generally used to "diagnose learners' errors so as to render pedagogical
> solutions.", i.e. a corpus obtained from the learners' language and thus
in
> the opposite direction of what I'm looking for.  So, if anybody knows
where
> to find more information on what I'm really looking for, or can tell me
what
> the proper term is for a corpus as I've described it, I'd be extremely
> grateful!
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Hanelle Fourie
>
> Division for University Education
> University of Stellenbosch
> South Africa
>