Linking up contrastive and learner corpus research: 66 (Language and Computers)

The papers brought together in this volume explore, through corpus data, the link between contrastive and interlanguage analysis. Learner corpora are approached from a contrastive perspective, by comparing them with native corpora or corpus data produced by learners from other mother tongue backgrounds, or by combining them with contrastive data from multilingual (translation or comparable) corpora. The integration of these two frameworks, contrastive and learner corpus research, makes it possible to highlight crucial aspects of learner production, such as features of non-nativeness (errors, over- and underuse, unidiomatic expressions), including universal features of interlanguage, or more general issues like the question of transfer. The ten papers of this volume cover topics ranging from methodology to syntax (e.g. adverb placement, postverbal subjects), through lexis (collocations) and discourse (e.g. information packaging, thematic choice). The languages examined include English, Chinese, Dutch, French and Spanish. The book will be of interest to a wide array of readers, especially researchers in second language acquisition and contrastive linguistics, but also professionals working in foreign language teaching, such as language teachers, materials writers and language testers.

Gaëtanelle Gilquin works at the University of Louvain (Belgium) as a researcher for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). Her research interests include corpus linguistics and contrastive linguistics, as well as the combined use of corpus and experimental data. She is the project leader of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI).
Szilvia Papp was Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and TEFL at the University of Portsmouth (UK) between 1999-2007, before joining University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations where she is currently working as a Research and Validation Officer. Her research interests include child and adult second language acquisition, learner corpora and language testing.
María Belén Díez-Bedmar is Assistant Professor at the University of Jaén (Spain), where she is currently working on her PhD. Her research interests include learner corpora, the acquisition of English as a foreign language, patterns of interlanguage evolution and the problematic areas in Spanish students’ use of English.