Learner Corpus Research and Second Language Acquisition: an attempt at bridging the gap

Abstract

Learner corpora are traditionally defined as ‘systematic collections of authentic, continuous and contextualized language use (spoken or written) by L2 learners stored in electronic format’ (Callies & Paquot 2015). With this characterization, it appears very clearly that learner corpus researchers have always been interested in exploring the output of the more open-ended types of contextualized production tasks assigned to L2 learners (e.g. Granger 2008; Tracy-Ventura & Myles 2015). The term ‘learners’ here refers to Foreign and/or Second Language learners rather than to learners acquiring their native language (L1).