Centre for English Corpus Linguistics - CECL

The Louvain Centre for English Corpus Linguistics has played a pioneering role in promoting computer learner corpora (CLC) and was among the first, if not the first, to begin compiling such a corpus. The Centre's computerised  databank is known as the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and is the result of over ten  years of collaborative activity between a number of universities internationally and currently contains over 3 million words of writing by learners of English from 21 different mother tongue backgrounds. The writing in the corpus has been contributed by advanced learners of English as a foreign language rather than as a second language and is made up of 21 distinct sub-corpora, each containing one language variety (E2French, E2German, E2Swedish etc). The type of writing being collected is essay writing (see below for fuller details). Advanced students can, for the purpose of the project, be broadly defined as university students of English in their 3rd or 4th year of study. In cases where the comparability of the level is in doubt, sample pieces of writing should be submitted beforehand.          

1. For further information contact:


Centre for English Corpus Linguistics       
Université catholique de Louvain
Place Blaise Pascal, 1
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium

Tel : +32 10 474034
Fax : +32 10 474942



2. Project director


Sylviane Granger
Tel : +32 10 474947
E-mail : sylviane.granger@uclouvain.be



3. Researchers


Fanny Meunier
Tel : +32 10 474974       
E-mail : fanny.meunier@uclouvain.be

Estelle Dagneaux
Tel : +32 10 474034
E-mail : estelle.dagneaux@uclouvain.be        

Magali Paquot
Tel : +32 10 474034
E-mail : magali.paquot@uclouvain.be  

Sylvie De Cock
Tel : +32 10 474034
E-mail : sylvie.decock@uclouvain.be


4. ICLE partners/contributors

 

Collecting the corpus is just the first step. Once the corpus is gathered, there are many opportunities for national and international research activities.  At the moment several international teams are running research projects in the areas of interlanguage syntax, lexis and discourse features.  A control English native corpus ( LOCNESS- the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) has also been gathered to enable a comparison of the ICLE material and a native corpus of the same type.

If you contribute to the ICLE project, you will have access to other learner corpora for comparative studies.  It should be stressed however that corpora are made available for academic research purposes only.  You will have the opportunity to participate in collaborative research projects with other national teams as well as attend our symposia.  Three have taken place already (January 1995 in Louvain, August 1996 in Abo - Finland and December 1998 in Hong Kong).  Many ICLE participants have contributed to a book on learner corpora which was published in 1998. (S. GRANGER ed. Learner English on Computer, Addison Wesley Longman).  You will also have access to the ICLE tagger (part-of-speech tagger) developed for the project by the TOSCA team.  The TOSCA Research Group is a team of corpus linguists at the University of Nijmegen under the direction of Prof. Jan Aarts.  Since the beginning of the 1980s the group has played a leading role in the field of corpus linguistics and has focused its research on the development of Tools for Syntactic Corpus Analysis (hence the acronym TOSCA). 

It is also worth mentioning that apart from the ICLE corpus we are collecting and working with other types of corpora in Louvain: a spoken learner corpus (LINDSEI - Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage), a corpus of French as a Foreign Language (FRIDA: French Interlanguage Database) and an English-French bilingual corpus of journalistic texts in collaboration with the university of Poitiers (PLECI, Poitiers-Louvain Echange de Corpus Informatisés).

The target size for each sub-corpus is 200,000 words. It may be possible to gather the full 200,000 words in one university or alternatively, if there is insufficient time or an insufficient number of students, collaboration with other universities (where the same language is spoken) may be sought. In order to reach the 200,000 word target, contributions from minimum 200 students are needed, as each student may only contribute up to 1,000 words.

1. Request students to fill in a learner profile

The ICLE learner profile has been created in order to provide researchers with information about contributors which will enable meaningful conclusions to be drawn from the results obtained when the corpus is analysed.  Using the profile, it will be possible both to draw general conclusions about advanced learner writing, and also to examine subsections e.g. Spanish mother tongue learners, learners who speak some English at home, learners for whom German is the second language and English is the third language. It will also be possible to examine more sociolinguistic aspects such as for instance male/female comparisons. If the corpus is used as a basis for developing specifically adapted teaching tools, the potential advantages of this facility are clear.                 

1. Collect the right type of material



        The corpus will consist entirely of essay writing. Two types of essay writing are useful:       



• Argumentative essay writing

 Using titles such as the ones below :

   - "Crime does not pay"
   - "Feminism has done more harm to the cause of women than good"
   - "Pollution : a silent conspiracy"
   - ...

These essays may be done by students in their own time (untimed), using language reference tools (dictionaries, grammars, etc.) but should be entirely the students' own work, i.e. they should not draw on other articles, books for the essay and should not ask  a native speaker of English for help. Alternatively,they may also be done under examination conditions.

Descriptive, narrative or technical subjects are not useful for the corpus. For this reason, the following types of titles should beavoided if possible:

- "The joys of the English countryside"
- "The British Electoral System" (prefer a topic such as "The British Electoral System is no guarantee of democracy")
- "My year in Amercia"
- "The position of the adverb in journalistic English"           

 

These are in some ways easier to collect, but it should be remembered that they must be accompanied by relevant learner profiles. Literature examination papers should not amount to more than 25% of each national corpus.

Essays can be completed at home (untimed), should be at least 500 words long (up to  1,000), and handed in on disk - plain text). This reduces the time spent typing up student essays and minimises the risk of introducing errors into the text. Work should be entirely the students' own, no help should be sought from third parties, but they may use reference tools suchas dictionaries and grammar books (use of reference tools should be indicated on the learner profile questionnaire).      

 Important note : the essays should be at least 500 words long (up to 1,000).

      

1. Send material to Louvain



         The essays should be handed in on disk (ideally text format, plus an original paper copy if the original is a manuscript). Learner profiles should also be sent together with the disk.       



2. Corpus format


• Corpus editing


- Leave all the spelling mistakes made by students. If you do not receive the essays in electronic form from the students, pay attention not to add spelling mistakes when keying in the data.        
- References in the text to authors, e.g. -(Granger, 1995)- have to be removed and replaced by the <R> symbol (R for reference).
- Quotes have to be removed and replaced by the <*> symbol except if they are very short and/or integrated in the sentence (as subject e.g.).
- Illegible words have to be preceded and followed by an angle bracket and a question mark : <?sorglub?> (or simply <?>).

N.B. We do not remove titles of books, journals, pop songs, etc because they generally make part of the sentence and if we remove them we'll have problems for the tagging.



• Corpus files


Please create a subdirectory for each subcorpus and within this subdirectory put only 1 essay per file. Use the following system :



a:\	frucl1\	0001.cor
		0002.cor
		0003.cor
		...

fr-	French mother tongue
ucl-	from the UCL
1	1st batch

0001.cor	1st essay
0002.cor	2nd essay
0003.cor	3rd essay

1. Crime does not pay.
2. The prison system is outdated. No civilised society should punish its criminals : it should rehabilitate them.
3. Most university degrees are theoretical and do not prepare students for the real world. They are therefore of very little value.
4. A man/woman's financial reward should be commensurate with their contribution to the society they live in.
5. The role of censorship in Western society.
6. Marx once said that religion was the opium of the masses. If he was alive at the end of the 20th century, he would replace religion with television.
7. All armies should consist entirely of professional soldiers : there is no value in a system of military service.
8. The Gulf War has shown us that it is still a great thing to fight for one's country.
9. Feminists have done more harm to the cause of women than good.
10. In his novel Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote "All men are equal : but some are more equal than others". How true is this today?
11. In the words of the old song "Money is the root of all evil".
12. Europe.
13. In the 19th century, Victor Hugo said : "How sad it is to think that nature is calling out but humanity refuses to pay heed. "Do you think it is still true nowadays ?
14. Some people say that in our modern world, dominated byscience technology and industrialisation, there is no longer a place for dreaming and imagination. What is your opinion ?