International Corpus of Learner English

The International Corpus of Learner English is a corpus of writing by higher intermediate to advanced learners of English as a foreign language. The corpus collection was initiated by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at the University of Louvain and is the result of close collaboration with a large number of partner universities around the world.

A first version of the ICLE corpus appeared in 2002 and contained c. 2.5 million words produced by learners from 11 mother tongue backgrounds (L1). The second version, released in 2009, contained c. 3.7 million words of written texts representing sixteen language backgrounds. This interface gives access to the third version of the ICLE, which is larger than the previous versions in terms of both number of words (c. 5 million words) and mother tongue backgrounds. In addition to those already present in ICLEv2 (Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Tswana), ICLEv3 also contains English data produced by learners from the following L1s: Brazilian Portuguese, Greek, Hungarian, Persian (Iran), Korean, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Pakistani and Serbian.

The corpus offers rich metadata on each of the texts included in the corpus, pertaining to both the learners (e.g. mother tongue, age, time spent in an English-speaking country) and the writing tasks (e.g. topic, use of reference tools, conditions of production of the text)