[Corpora-List] learner corpora

[Hilary Nesi]

Antoine Goulem asked about corpora for high school students who have difficulty writing essays. He might find the BAWE corpus useful, www.coventry.ac.uk/bawe<http://www.coventry.ac.uk/bawe> . It's composed of British University student assignments from first year undergraduate up to taught Masters level - they all received relatively high marks and I don't consider it a 'learner corpus' as such, but it has been used a fair bit to inform academic writing materials and textbooks for both 'native' and 'non-native' speaker writers. A follow-on project has developed corpus-informed academic writing activities on the British Council Learn English website  www.britishcouncil.org/writingforapurpose. The materials include CALL-style exercises, multimedia files, discipline-specific keyword lists, and links to the BAWE corpus on SketchEngine - they are intended for students around the world who have to write university assignments in the medium of English. We are continually adding to the site and welcome feedback.
About two thirds of the assignments in the BAWE corpus were contributed by students who claimed that English was their first language and about a third by students who claimed another language as their L1, but I agree with Antoine that these distinctions are not necessarily very meaningful in British or Canadian university contexts.
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Hilary Nesi
Department of English and Languages
Coventry University
UK
h.nesi at coventry.ac.uk<mailto:h.nesi at coventry.ac.uk>
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