Spoken English Learner Corpora

In this paper we present a survey of some most significant spoken English learner corpora created up to date. Spoken learner corpora which include speech generated by learners are important in many areas of research and practice, in particular, for identifying typical pronunciation errors of learners of English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL), or English as a lingua franca (ELF). The data on common errors is helpful in designing more effective methods of pronunciation teaching as an aspect of language training. Also, error patterns can be implemented in intelligent tutor systems for English learning in order to design explanations and exercises in the error-preventive way and to generate a relevant feedback to the learner. The corpora we survey in this article include various types of English speech generated by learners with Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, among others, as their first language (L1). Some English learner corpora described here are created for a single L1, other corpora are compiled for various first languages. Also, learner corpora vary depending on what type of English they exhibit: ESL, EFL, ELF or their combinations.