Compiling Taiwanese Learner Corpus of English

This paper presents the mechanisms of and criteria for compiling a new learner corpus of English, the quantitative characteristics of the corpus and a practical example of its pedagogical application. The Taiwanese Learner Corpus of English (TLCE), probably the largest annotated learner corpus of English in Taiwan so far, contains 2105 pieces of English writing (around 730,000 words) from Taiwanese college students majoring in English. It is a useful resource for scholars in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and English Language Teaching (ELT) areas who wish to find out how people in Taiwan learn English and how to help them learn better. The quantitative information shown in the work reflects the characteristics of learner English in terms of part-of-speech distribution, lexical density, and trigram distribution. The usefulness of the corpus is demonstrated by a means of corpus-based investigation of learners’ lack of adverbial collocation knowledge.