Book Reviews

Learner Corpus Research: New
Perspectives and Applications

Brezina, V. & Flowerdew, L. (eds). (2018). Bloomsbury (179pp.). ISBN: 978-1-4742-7288-9. (£85.00)
Reviewed by Jennifer Jordan
Kwansei Gakuin University
Learner Corpus Research: New perspectives and applications is part of a series called
Research in Corpus and Discourse. This edited edition of eight studies has a wide
scope covering a variety of approaches and uses for corpus linguistics with learnercorpora. Learner corpora are computerized collections of learner language,written or spoken, analyzed using corpus software. The editors both have a long
history in the field: Brezina is one of the developers of #LancsBox, a tool forcorpus analysis (http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/index.php); Flowerdew
has published numerous books and articles covering corpora and language
teaching.
Overall, this is a thoroughly readable and well-organized book which
provides those with some background in Learner Corpus Research (LCR) witha few ideas for deviation from what is usually seen in the field. Several chapters
focus on spoken learner corpora which have been underrepresented to date in theresearch for the obvious reason that spoken corpora are more time consumingto compile. Several of the studies use the Trinity Lancaster Corpus (TLC)
compiled from Trinity’s Graded Exams in Spoken English (GESE) test. The
TLC provides researchers with English as a second language (L2) contributions
from native speakers from nine different first language (L1) backgrounds over98

Learner Corpus Research, OnCUE Journal, 11(1), pages 98-101

three different proficiency levels on the Common European Framework ofReference for Languages scale. The argument for an increased representationof spoken corpora in the field is, as Myles (2005) argues, that spoken corpora
allow for greater insight into interlanguage as the language is not “complicatedby additional layers of learnt knowledge and monitoring process.” To this end,
the TLC and the examples of how it might be used provided here, represent
progress for those who would like to access and study learner language without
the significant undertaking of creating a spoken corpus.
Additionally, the majority of the research in the book looks at learner
language in its own right, avoiding the comparison with native speaker language
whereas significant portion of LCR has used Granger’s Contrastive Interlanguage
Analysis (CIA) introduced in 1996 (see Granger, 2015 for a discussion of CIA).
For those unfamiliar with CIA, this involves a comparison of language in alearner corpus to either a) native speaker language or b) language from a similargroup of learners with a different L1 background (Granger, 2015). Within thefive chapters of this book dedicated to learner language, only one uses a nativereference corpus in this way whereas the rest provide useful examples for thosewishing to step away from the comparison of L2 learners to monolinguals.
In one of the remaining four chapters, there is a nicely designed study
examining learners’ use of the ‘yes, but…’ construction for disagreement. Theauthors examine not only the construction itself, but also the hedging language
surrounding it that learners use at various proficiency levels for their language tobecome increasingly pragmatically appropriate. Another study uses DocuScope
software, which analyzes the rhetorical functions used in a corpus, to determine
which were most prevalent in the executive summary genre, as indicated bymodel essays, compared to the FROWN corpus of more general language. This
provides an indication of how learners use model essays as resources for language
which the teacher researcher can extrapolate to other contexts.
There is only one longitudinal study, in the penultimate chapter, but it
provides a useful resource for those seeking a model for examining changes inlearner language over time. Because of the time-consuming nature of collecting
data from the same group of learners on repeated occasions, lack of continuous99

Jordanaccess to learners, and other constraints, researchers have opted for collecting
data at a single point in time and comparing the language used at different
proficiency levels in a pseudo-longitudinal design. To examine changes ininterlanguage at different points however, longitudinal collections provide moredata.
The final chapter presents a study worth replicating in the Japanese context.
It looks at the English figurative language use of French L1 speakers. The
researcher finds considerable transfer in this aspect of students’ language. It
would be interesting to see how the greater language distance between English
and Japanese, compared to French and English, affects the results. For anyone
interested in transfer, this chapter is worth the read.
In terms of organization, each chapter explicitly states the research questions
and the results are presented in such a way that a reader can easily identify how
the authors have interpreted the evidence to find their answers.
With the inclusion of New Perspectives and Applications in the title, I was
hoping for perhaps more in terms of dealing with some of the other problems
that tend to appear in LCR. First, learner corpora are often necessarily small
and it is difficult to justify generalizations when the data is taken from a small
population of learners. More work needs to be done before it will be possible
to say that language from one group of learners is representative of others fromthe same L1 or proficiency level. Nonetheless, researchers sometimes wish to
apply conclusions from one set of data to other learners in different contexts. I
felt that there are times in this book as well when the conclusions or potential
pedagogical implications were not thoroughly justified. Many potential LCR
researchers are teachers wanting to know more about their learners’ abilities
and needs. To this end, more useful than the conclusions drawn about learners’
language or abilities are the methodologies and the operationalization of various
key terms used in the studies. Miller and Pessoa’s use of DocuScope software
to analyze the rhetorical functions used in a corpus could easily be a model forother researchers. Expansion on how this could be used by the teacher-researcher
is potentially more useful than the actual answers to their research questions.
Likewise, in their chapter, Götz & Mukherjee, wishing to examine fluency,
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Learner Corpus Research, OnCUE Journal, 11(1), pages 98-101

accuracy and vocabulary development, operationalize these in terms that can besearched in corpora in ways that can be usefully applied by others wishing to
examine similar features.
There is much to be learned from learner corpora. They are useful tools forstudying how to better serve specific learners in a context and they provide ameans to better understand language acquisition. This book provides examplesof how researchers might approach either of these goals, and the increased focus
on spoken corpora and longitudinal corpora is a good addition to the field.

References

Granger, S. (2015). Contrastive interlangauge analysis: A reappraisal.
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 1(1), 7-24.
Myles, F. (2005). Interlanguage corpora and second language
acquisition research. Second Language Research, 21(4), 373-391.
doi:10.1191/0267658305sr252oa

Author bio

Jennifer Jordan is an Assistant Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University. She
is currently developing a learner corpus as part of her PhD studies at Cardiff
University. She’s been teaching EFL in Korea and Japan for the last 20 years. jordan.
jen@gmail.com
Date Received: February 1, 2018
Date Accepted: March 17, 2018101