Conférence avec Magali Paquot, enseignante-chercheuse de l'ULC Louvain

Learner corpora of language for specific purposes: from design to applications

Magali Paquot (FNRS – CECL, UCLouvain)

Learner corpora – electronic collections of texts produced by foreign or second language learners – have become indispensable resources in second language acquisition research, language pedagogy, and natural language processing. While general-purpose learner corpora are now well established, corpora of language for specific purposes (LSP) remain comparatively less explored, despite their potential to provide a window on how learners acquire and use language in specialized contexts.

This talk will first present a selected overview of LSP learner corpora, focusing on their design principles, compilation challenges, and methods of analysis. It will then discuss findings on learner writing for specific purposes, with particular attention to register preferences and phraseological patterns. Finally, it will point to the applications that such corpora make possible, especially in language teaching and assessment.

The talk will close with a set of desiderata for future corpus compilation and research, with an emphasis on increasing the availability of open resources, improving comparability across corpora, and ensuring that findings can inform both theoretical insights and pedagogical practice.

• About Magali Paquot

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