Learner Corpora: Construction and Explorations in Chinese and Related Languages

Book excerpt: This edited book reflects the state of the art in learner corpus and related approaches to Chinese as a second language (CSL). CSL as a field has flourished in the past few decades due to the increasingly important role of the Chinese language at the world stage, yet studies of Chinese as a second language based on learner corpora have been less well developed due to the limited availability of data and lack of theoretical insights. This book represents the latest research in this area by 1) assembling a large group of active researchers from multiple international research communities (USA, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Taiwan, and France); 2) discussing the latest resources and technologies in Chinese and other Asian languages learner corpora and corpus building; 3) basing Chinese as a second language studies on data from learners of Chinese with a wide range of first language backgrounds (English, Japanese, Korean, French, among others); and 4) integrating corpus methods with a wide range of related methods in allied fields—language acquisition, usage-based linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. This comprehensive collection is indispensable for anyone who is interested in corpus approaches to CSL and Chinese applied language studies in general.