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ICLE

The International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) is a corpus of essay writing by upper intermediate and advanced learners. Founded and coordinated by Sylviane Granger of the University of Louvain, the corpus is the results of almost 30 years of collaborative activity between a large number of universities internationally. Since the release of the first second editions in 2002 and 2009 respectively, the corpus has been used in a wide range of research projects internationally, served as the basis from many MA and PhD ttheses and generally played a key role in promoting the field of learner corpus research.

The first version of the corpus (2002) contained 2.5 million words produced by learners from 11 mother tongue backgrounds. The second version (2009) was larger in terms of both words (3.7 million) and language backgrounds (16). The current version differs from the previous ones in two major ways. Firstly, it is even larger than the previous versions, as it includes data from 25 mother tongue backgrounds, amounting to over 5.5 million words. In addition, unlike the preceding versions – which were both distributed on CD-ROMs – ICLEv3 is hosted on a brand-new web-based interface. This allows not only for easier and more flexible access but also for the regular inclusion of new subcorpora as they are completed, thereby highlighting the fundamentally dynamic nature of the ICLE project. Based on the abundant feedback that we have received over the years from scholars using the corpus, the functionalities that were already available in the previous versions of the ICLE have been enhanced significantly. The enhancement of the concordance tool and the corpus download facilities, for instance, is intended to answer the growing concern for the study of internal variability and individual differences in learner data.

Licences (for non-profit educational purposes only). Available from https://www.i6doc.com/en/book/?GCOI=28001105280390

  • single-user and multi-user licences
  • site licence (only for institutions that are members of the Shibboleth consortium https://www.shibboleth.net)

Licences give access to the ICLEv3 web interface and a copy of the ICLE handbook published by Louvain University Press, which contains a detailed description of the corpus, an overview of the ELT situation in the countries of origin of the learners and a user’s guide to the web interface.