Learner Corpus Research conference - Bergen, 27th- 29th September 2013

Review and reflections

I was invited by Cambridge University Press Language Research department to attend the second Learner Corpus Research conference in Bergen last week. I won't dwell here on the organization, accommodation, food, leisure facilities, dancing, live music, and much-needed opportunities for quiet reflection (see above), which were all beyond my wildest imaginings. The whole package was faultless and I'm very grateful to CUP for sending me, and to the organizers for all their work.

The conference was attended by about 120 participants - lecturers, researchers, PhD students, teachers and teacher trainers - from all over the world. There were 4 plenaries, 49 presentations and around 20 posters and demos. A complete book of abstracts is available for download here. The country with the most accepted papers was Spain - some great work going on there with learner corpora! - but speakers came from a very wide range of countries and disciplines.

In the 4 plenaries, Sylviane Granger: Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis: a reappraisal;  reminded us in a very timely way, of the importance of constantly re-evaluating our research hypotheses, methods and aims. Bård Uri Jensen: "A chi-square test showed that..." or did it really? Some remarks on the use of statistical tests in corpus-based research warned us against allowing the powerful and apparently simple statistical tools now at our fingertips to do our thinking for us. John Osborne: Comparisons are odorous: native-speaker data in learner corpus research urged us to circumspection about the role of 'native-speaker' corpora as reference corpora for the study of learner interlanguage. And Scott Jarvis: Signals and clues in detecting cross-linguistic influence: What detectives and detectors can tell us highlighted the value of human judges working *together* with machine classifiers to uncover and analyze corpus research clues.

For me, the buzzwords/phrases of the conference seemed to be (in no particular order):

EGAP/ESAP teaching
Spoken corpora - compiling, error-annotating
Longitudinal corpora
Statistical tools for the analysis of corpora
The status of native speaker data in the age of World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca
Reference corpora and comparability of corpora
Freely-available and user-friendly corpus tools for analysis and annotation
The Common European Framework of Reference
Availability of corpus data
Using learner corpora in the EFL classroom
Lexical bundles/formulaic sequences/fixed expressions/multi-grams
Collocations

There were software demos of a more user-friendly interface for error-annotated and -corrected corpora in Sketch Engine; freely-available corpus compilation, annotation and analysis tools developed at Autonomous University Madrid - CorpusTool, which a number of researchers at the conference were using, and the new, freely-available 30m word EF-CamDat learner corpus.

A landmark event was the launch of the Learner Corpus Association to provide a forum for exchanging ideas on learner corpus research from an interdisciplinary perspective:

- Second language acquisition
- Foreign language teaching (including CALL)
- Language testing
- NLP applications (automated scoring, L1 identification, error detection and correction, etc.)
- other language-related fields

Members (membership costs between 20 and 60 Euros, depending on your status) get access to a range of resources, including shared corpora, publications and corpus tools and a regularly updated searchable learner corpus bibliography with more than 900 entries. They will also be able to take part in forums focused on a range of topics (learner corpus design, annotation, methodology, applications, etc.) and benefit from discounts negotiated by the LCA. There is currently a special offer of free 6-month trial access to Sketch Engine.

I was at the first Learner Corpus Research conference in Louvain in 2011 and my impression is that the availability and accessibility of both learner corpora and user-friendly corpus tools has really gathered pace in the last two years and will continue to do so, and that this is slowly bringing learner corpora and corpora in general out of the research centres and into the classroom. There is still a great wealth of fascinating research coming out of those centres. I am pleased to see that it is reaching a wider audience and gaining wider application in SLA and in ELT teaching and materials development. I'm excited about what the next two years will bring!

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