The Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA) 

 

The VESPA learner corpus project was initiated in January 2008 by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at the University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium. The aim of the project is to build a large collection of disciplinary writing by L2 English university students across registers and disciplines.

We want to collect L2 texts in a wide range of disciplines (linguistics, business, medicine, law, biology, etc), registers (papers, reports, MA dissertations) and degrees of writer expertise in academic settings (from first-year students to PhD students).

If you are interested in joining this exciting venture and contributing to VESPA, do not hesitate to contact us. We would be happy to give you any additional information you may need and already look forward to collaborating with you on the development of VESPA.

Availability:

VESPA (first release) is available for teaching and research purposes at https://corpora.uclouvain.be/cecl/vespa/. It can also be downloaded from the UCLouvain dataverse.

How to cite?

Please cite the following reference in any work that makes use of VESPA:

Paquot, M., Larsson, T., Hasselgård, H., Ebeling, S. O., De Meyere, D., Valentin, L., Laso, N. J., Verdaguer, I., & van Vuuren, S. (2022). The Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA): Towards a multi-L1 and multi-register learner corpus of disciplinary writing. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 10(2), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.10.02.02