Sylviane Granger

Université Catholique de Louvain - UCLouvain | UCLouvain · Centre for English Corpus Linguistics

Based on the large body of research that shows phraseology to be pervasive in language, this study aims to assess the role played by phraseological competence in the development of L2 writing proficiency and text quality assessment. We propose to use CollGram, a technique that assigns to each pair of contiguous words (bigrams) in a learner text two...

The Error Tgging Manual Version 0.2 is a revised and fully revamped version of the manual which was designed by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics of the University of Louvain in the 1990s and has been used by numerous researchers internationally to annotate errors in learner corpora. With a view to ensuring ease of use and maximum intra- an...

This chapter considers the use of data-driven learning (DDL) in the language classroom. It highlights its pedagogical functions and describes the main issues to bear in mind when choosing a corpus and a query tool to do DDL. It also provides an overview of the way DDL may be operationalised and shows how the DDL activities should be adapted to the...

This chapter argues that the passive should not be seen as a purely grammatical phenomenon, but as a phenomenon at the lexis-grammar interface, representing a continuum that ranges from the most central representatives to the most peripheral. It uses written corpus data to explore whether different populations of learners studying English as a fore...

The extended view of phraseology, which relies on the use of large electronic corpora and powerful automatic extraction methods, has not yet had the expected impact on bilingual lexicography. The aim of this study is to examine some of the weaknesses in the phraseological coverage of current bilingual dictionaries and to suggest ways of overcoming...

The aim of my presentation is to take you on a journey from the very beginnings of learner corpus research (LCR) in the early 1990s through to the present day. As this journey coincides for the most part with my own scientific career, I will also take this opportunity to share some personal memories of my own journey in LCR. In the first part of th...

Press releases represent a hybrid business genre, which combines an informational and a promotional communicative purpose. The objective of the study is to assess the extent to which this duality is reflected in the language used, and more particularly in the expression of stance, by comparing corporate press releases with another business genre th...

This book investigates the field of phraseology from a learner corpus perspective, bringing together studies at the cutting edge of corpus-based research into phraseology and language learners. The chapters include learner-corpus-based studies of phraseological units in varieties of learner language differentiated in terms of task and/or learner va...

Core vocabulary items (e.g. thing, way) are often viewed as the enemy of effective academic writing, and style guides and textbooks often advise against using them. However, their bad reputation seems to stem from a single-word perspective that ignores the rich phraseological units that such items tend to figure in. In this study, we focus on the c...

Advances in Learner Corpus Research (LCR) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have brought these two fast-moving fields significantly closer in recent years. This volume brings together contributions from internationally recognized experts in both LCR and SLA to provide an innovative, cross-collaborative examination of how both areas can provide...

The present volume contains selected proceedings from the fifth edition of the Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (UCCTS) international conference held at the University of Louvain in September 2018. It brings together thirteen chapters that all make use of electronic comparable and/or parallel corpora to inform contrastive lingui...

The International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) is a corpus of essay writing by upper intermediate and advanced learners. Founded and coordinated by Sylviane Granger at the University of Louvain, the corpus is the results of almost 30 years of collaborative activity between a large number of universities internationally. Since the release of the...

This chapter reviews the contribution of learner corpus research to the study of two types of formulaic expression, namely collocations and lexical bundles. It sums up some of the key findings related to frequency of use, accuracy and appropriacy, L1 transfer and development. Special attention is paid to aspects of research design that have a stron...

Louvain English for Academic Purposes Dictionary

In the current study, we investigate aspects of the learner phrasicon based on a section of the Longitudinal Database of Learner English (LONGDALE), made up of written data produced by learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) followed over a period of three years. Section 2 describes the phraseological measure used in the study, which we ref...

One of the weaknesses of most current academic word lists is that they fail to do justice to the large stock of multiword units that is typical of academic language. The objective of this chapter is to raise awareness of the importance of phrasal academic vocabulary. After a brief critical survey of three recently compiled phrasal academic lists, t...

Analyzing learner language is a key component of second and foreign language education research and serves two main purposes: it helps researchers gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of second language acquisition (SLA) and it is a useful source of data for practitioners who are keen to design teaching and learning tools that target learn...

Analyzing learner language is a key component of second and foreign language education research and serves two main purposes: it helps researchers gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of second language acquisition (SLA) and it is a useful source of data for practitioners who are keen to design teaching and learning tools that target learn...

General bilingual dictionaries tend to cater for the needs of all users, i.e. both native and non-native speakers of either language. To maximize their usefulness for non-native users, they need to be ‘learnerized’, i.e. adapted to the needs of specific learner groups. Based on the observation that learners’ phraseological needs are acute and only...

Written and spoken data produced by learners has always been a key resource for the study of second language acquisition (SLA). However, for a long time the data used was rather artificial, i.e. resulting from highly controlled language tasks, and therefore not necessarily a reflection of what learners do in more natural communication contexts. In...

The origins of learner corpus research go back to the late 1980s, when large electronic collections of written or spoken data started to be collected from foreign/second language learners, with a view to advancing our understanding of the mechanisms of second language acquisition and developing tailor-made pedagogical tools. Engaging with the inter...

Since its introduction in 1996, Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) has become a highly popular method in Learner Corpus Research. Its comparative design has made it possible to uncover a wide range of features distinctive of learner language and assess their degree of generalizability across learner populations. At the same time, however, the...

Writing idiomatic academic texts in English is a challenge faced by an increasing number of international students and scholars. In this article, we present a web-based dictionary-cum-writing aid tool, the Louvain English for Academic Purposes Dictionary, which aims to address the attested needs of non-native writers of English, with a particular f...

Although learner corpus research also has a more theoretical objective, i.e. to contribute to a better understanding of the second language acquisition process, the link with foreign language applications has been foregrounded from the start and continues to be as prevalent today as it was twenty years ago. For Mukherjee (2009: 212), it is even one...

While a large range of language varieties had been explored by corpus linguists from the emergence of the field, it was only in the late 1980s that corpus linguists began to show an interest in learner language and started collecting learner corpora, i.e. electronic collections of writing or speech produced by foreign or second language learners. T...

Phraseological competence, the use of (semi-)prefabricated expressions in language, is a major component of second language acquisition. Recent research focused on lexical bundles, i.e. recurrent contiguous strings of words, has highlighted quantitative and qualitative differences between native and non-native speaker use of these strings. Few stud...

Contrastive studies of phraseology have tended to focus on figurative units, such as idioms and metaphors, and paid comparatively less attention to less colourful types of units such as collocations and lexical bundles, which are equally, if not more, worthy of study. This article tries to fill this gap by exploring the potential contribution of a...

This chapter is intended to provide a practical, comprehensive overview of learner corpus research. Granger first situates learner corpus research in relation to SLA and ELT research then goes on to discuss corpus compilation, highlighting the importance of establishing clear design criteria, which she argues should always bear a close relation to...

The emergence of corpus-based research has revealed novel insights into the workings of the passive. In this article I give an overview of the new features that have emerged from the analysis of both native and learner corpora and check some of the findings, in particular those related to frequency of use and overpassivization, on the basis of two...

In the first part of this article, we explore the background of computer-assisted learning from its beginnings in the early XIX th century and the first teaching machines, founded on theories of learning, at the start of the XX th century. With the arrival of the computer, it became possible to offer language learners different types of language ac...

This book introduces the rapidly evolving field of electronic lexicography. The aim is to provide a wide overview of the full process of electronic dictionary production and present some of the challenges faced by publishers, editors and lexicographers as well as the benefits offered to a wide range of users language learners, translators and profe...

This chapter contains a general introduction to the field of electronic lexicography and gives an overview of the contents of the volume. The first section introduces the different dimensions of the field of electronic lexicography, reviews the main typologies of electronic dictionaries and identifies the main focus of the volume as human-oriented...

Learner corpora are electronic collections of (near-)natural foreign or second-languagelearner (L2) language assembled according to explicit design criteria (Granger, 2008). Keywords: esl/efl; research methods in applied linguistics; second language acquisition; corpus; language for specific purposes; writing

Formulaic language is at the heart of corpus linguistic research, and learner corpus research (LCR) is no exception. As multiword units of all kinds (e.g., collocations, phrasal verbs, speech formulae) are notoriously difficult for learners, and corpus linguistic techniques are an extremely powerful way of exploring them, they were an obvious area...

Main Stages in Learner Corpus ResearchProject Ideas and ResourcesStudy QuestionsReferences

Based on a corpus of 223 argumentative essays written by English as a foreign language learners, this study shows that spelling errors, whether detected manually or automatically, are a reliable predictor of the quality of L2 texts and that reliability is further improved by sub-categorising errors. However, the benefit derived from sub-categorisat...

The two major corollaries of Sinclair's contextual approach - the interdependence of lexis and grammar and the idiom principle - constitute a major challenge for linguistic theory, language description and all language applications, but in no field is the challenge more acute than in foreign language learning and teaching. Both Sinclair's contextua...

This chapter revisits the dichotomy that is traditionally made in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research between English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) and argues, on the basis of data from the International Corpus of Learner English, that it should be viewed as a continuum instead, with many in-between categ...

Data-Driven Learning (DDL) consists in using the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics for pedagogical purposes. This type of approach presents several advantages. The first obvious one is that it brings authenticity into the classroom. Not only do corpora make it possible to expose learners to authentic language, but they can actually present...

In this article, we describe the Louvain EAP Dictionary (LEAD), a web-based English for Academic Purposes dictionary-cum-writing aid for non-native writers. The LEAD dictionary contains a rich description of non-technical words that express key functions in academic discourse (such as contrast, exemplification or cause and effect), with particular...

The field of lexicography is undergoing a major revolution. The rapid replacement of the traditional paper dictionary by electronic dictionaries opens up exciting possibilities but also constitutes a major challenge to the field. The eLexicography in the 21st Century: New Challenges, New Applications conference organized by the Centre for English C...

In his review of Lewis’s (2000) book on teaching collocation, Barfield (2001: 415) highlights the exciting challenge offered by Lewis’s lexical approach but laments the fact that ‘the voices of typical language learners are largely omitted’ in the volume. The three chapters in this section put learners centre stage and can therefore be seen as redr...

While the field of technology-enhanced language learning (TELL) is undeniably thriving, most technology-enhanced language tools are still relatively crude. One reason for this is that the field is disconnected from research in natural language processing (NLP) and corpus linguistics (CL), two fields which could greatly improve the effectiveness of...

Although phraseology has recently begun to establish itself as a field in its own right, this process is being hindered by two main factors: the highly variable and wide-ranging scope of the field and the vast and confusing terminology associated with it. This chapter tackles these two issues successively in an attempt to disentangle the 'phraseolo...

Learner corpora are electronic collections of language data produced by L2 learners, that is, second or foreign-language learners. This relatively new resource is of great relevance for both second language acquisition (SLA) research and foreign-language teaching (FLT).Keywords:esl/efl;language teaching;research methods in applied linguistics;secon...

This article deals with the place of learner corpora, i.e. corpora containing authentic language data produced by learners of a foreign/second language, in English for academic purposes (EAP) pedagogy and sets out to demonstrate that they have a valuable contribution to make to the field. Following an initial brief introduction to corpus-based anal...

Learner corpora, electronic collections of spoken or written data from foreign language learners, offer unparalleled access to many hitherto uncovered aspects of learner language, particularly in their error-tagged format. This article aims to demonstrate the role that the learner corpus can play in CALL, particularly when used in conjunction with...

A two-day expert workshop on the role of language in Technology-Enhanced Learning was held at the University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) on October 4th-5th 2007. The workshop’s title was: “Optimizing the role of language in Technology Enhanced Learning”. The primary objective of the IDILL workshop was to bring together academic experts a...

Despite a mere decade of existence, the field of computer learner corpus (CLC) research has been the focus of so much active international work that it seems worth taking a retrospective look at the research accomplished to date and considering the prospects for future research in both Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies and Foreign Language...

Learner corpora—electronic collections of foreign or second language learner data—con-stitute a new resource for second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language teaching (FLT) specialists. They are especially useful when they are error-tagged, that is, when all errors in the corpus have been annotated with the help of a standardized system o...

In this introductory chapter, Granger traces the development of Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies over the last decades to the present day, focusing on the role of the computer corpus in giving new impetus to each field and bringing them closer together. She discusses the different types of monolingual and multilingual corpora being u...

Over the last twenty years, phraseology has become a major field of pure and applied research in Western European and North American linguistics. This book is made up of authoritative contributions from leading specialists who examine the increasingly crucial role played by ready-made word-combinations in language acquisition and adult language use...

This article introduces the technique of Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA), a new approach to the analysis of learner errors which it is hoped will give new impetus to Error Analysis research, and re-establish it as an important area of study. The data used to demonstrate the technique consist of a 150,000-word corpus of English written by French...

This dictionary gives a complete picture of 1,000 pairs of English-French false friends in a single entry: clear examples illustrating the meanings of each word pair, supplemented by explanatory notes; indication of pronunciation and differences in meaning, style and idiomatic use; indexes of English and French translations

In this study we focus on cohesion in discourse, and more specifically on connector usage. Acknowledging the importance of combining a top-down and a bottom-up approach in the study of discourse, we adopt a bottom-up approach which is favoured by our methodology. In the first section we evaluate previous studies of learner connector usage and the l...

A report on ICLE (the International Corpus of Learner English), a project that collects written work from, and analyses the usage of, advanced adult EFL learners

My very first paper on learner corpora and more specifically on the rationale behind the collection of the International Corpus of Learner English.

There can be Jittle doubt that tor anyone in daily contact with two closely related languages such as Engtish and French, the problem of false friends constitutes a veritable minefield. Given the notorious treacherousness of these deceptive pairs, one is surprised by the paucity of the tools avaHable toassist the student, teacher or translator in d...

The highly polysemous and phraseological nature of high frequency words makes them a major stumbling block for both lexicographers and learners. This article seeks to investigate the lexicographic treatment of high frequency words through a detailed study of the verb make in five recent editions of monolingual learners' dictionaries (CALD 2003, COB...