Learner corpora to cater for learners’ individual needs

Abstract

Learner corpora, like other corpora, have mostly been used to generalize about whole populations. Yet, they can be exploited for teaching purposes in a more differentiated and inclusive manner, by showing how learners with a specific profile use (or are likely to use) the target language. Such an approach can rely on the metadata found in existing learner corpora or on corpus data collected among one’s own students. Findings based on the analysis of these corpora can help develop tailor-made pedagogical materials and activities to meet learners’ individual needs, including data-driven learning activities through which students make discoveries about their own target language use.