A Russian EFL Learner Corpus from Scratch

Since Sylviane Granger’s research group findings (1998) Learner Corpora (LC) have been looked upon as a valuable resource to pinpoint widespread and recurrent learner errors, predominantly lexical. Online text tools now available suggest working with grammatical issues, and their application, handy enough, redirects a traditional linguist from applying to national or other “ready-made” corpora to creating specialized “home-made” ones. Therefore “from scratch” in this case is, by no means, ignoring the previous experience, but developing a target-specific corpus structure. A written and spoken English corpus from Russian students of intermediate level was set as a research resource aimed at looking for other language events than those analyzed by Sylviane Granger’s project, namely the range, complexity and frequency of sentence patterns in school essays and dialogues. The desiderata at present are comparative rather than didactic issues.