LINGUIST List 15.201

Tue Jan 20 2004

FYI: Summer School: Learner Corpus Research

Editor for this issue: Anne Clarke <annelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Sylviane Granger, Summer School: Learner Corpus Research

SUMMER SCHOOL

LEARNER CORPUS RESEARCH: THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

13-17 September 2004
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Organised by the
Centre for English Corpus Linguistics
University of Louvain

COURSE DESCRIPTION
Learner corpora are electronic collections of texts produced by
foreign/second language learners. This new resource has a lot to offer
both to theoreticians interested in the process of second language
acquisition and to practitioners keen to produce more efficient
teaching and learning tools and classroom methodologies.

Interest in this new resource is growing fast and a great many learner
corpora are being collected and analysed internationally by academics
and publishers. While researchers can rely to a large extent on the
methods and tools developed by corpus linguists working on native
data, they need to be aware that learner corpora are special corpora,
which differ in significant ways from native corpora and therefore
call for their own methods of analysis and software tools.

The aim of the summer school is to introduce learner corpus research
through a series of lectures, hands-on sessions and individual
tutoring. It is intended both for researchers who have recently
embarked on a learner corpus project and those who simply want to know
more about this new field of research.

COURSE DIRECTOR: Professor Sylviane Granger, Director of the Centre
for English Corpus Linguistics

LECTURERS: Sylvie De Cock, Sylviane Granger, Fanny Meunier

The three lecturers have been involved in the collection and analysis
of written and spoken learner corpora for over a decade. They are
attached to the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at the
University of Louvain, which coordinates two international learner
corpus projects: the International Corpus of Learner English and the
Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage.

LANGUAGE OF INSTRUCTION: English

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 25

VENUE: University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (30 km south of
Brussels, direct train connection)

TOPICS COVERED IN THE LECTURES
Learner corpus collection (written and spoken data): corpus design
criteria and markup Learner corpus annotation (POS-tagging and error
tagging) Computer-aided analysis of lexis, grammar and discourse
Learner corpora and Second Language Acquisition research Pedagogical
applications of learner corpora (dictionaries, teaching materials,
CALL programs)

HANDS-ON IN COMPUTER LAB
International Corpus of Learner English CD-ROM (S. Granger,
E. Dagneaux & F. Meunier eds, 2002) University of Louvain Error
Editor Text retrieval software programs (concordancers)

TUTORING
Individual guidance on participants' projects

For further details see
http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/fltr/germ/etan/cecl/cecl.html

Professor Sylviane Granger
Centre for English Corpus Linguistics
University of Louvain (Belgium)