The PhD/MA Program in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language

This lecture outlines my fifteen-year journey in designing and compiling learner corpora, from early work on general collections to more recent efforts to build specialist corpora exploring advanced English learners’ fluency and accuracy and the language of specialist users. Along the way, my understanding of what learner corpora can (and cannot!) tell us has evolved, in which process I was helped by both practical experience and constant methodological reflection. I will share key findings from my research and use these to illustrate how different elicitation tasks and design choices influence what we discover about learner language. Through examples from several corpora I have developed, I aim to show how methodological awareness grows with practice, and how principled corpus design can assist us in exploring second language learning.