2020 年 5 巻 p. 38-55
The application of corpus linguistics to the collection and study of learner-produced texts offers a wealth of possibilities for linguistic inquiry that are limited only by the inquisitiveness of the language researcher. Furthermore, the field of learner corpus research has the capacity to shed light on largely unknown aspects of the process by which language learners acquire a target language. This article will describe the design, collection, and initial analysis of a pilot corpus of writing produced by Japanese EFL learners studying in a tertiary English program in Japan. The writings that comprise the first phase of the corpus were collected in the Fall semester of 2018 and the Spring semester of 2019 at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) in Japan and consist of all the writing assignments that a selected group of students were required to complete throughout each semester. The primary objectives of this project are to investigate the process of language acquisition by Japanese students through the exploitation of a learnersʼ corpus (Kennedy, 1998) and to produce a resource for investigating gaps in the studentsʼ interlanguage in order to address them in course curricula (Nesselhauf, 2004, Granger, 2002). The topics of discussion will include a description of the process of corpus design and text collection, a discussion of word frequencies in comparison with a native English corpus (LOCHNESS), and a discussion of the word coverage of the New General Service List (NGSL) and the New Academic Word List (NAWL). The findings from the coverage data of the two word lists suggest that students might benefit from curriculum that focuses on words from the NGSL that are outside of its most frequent 1000 words, and an increased emphasis on the teaching of the academic vocabulary included in the NAWL.
