Abstract

This article provides an overview of the process and initial outcomes of designing a multilingual corpus of academic texts produced by university students with different mother tongues in South Africa, with a view to making it available as an open resource for pedagogical applications and research. We first give an overview of the history of corpus development for pedagogical purposes world-wide, with particular emphasis on learner corpora, and highlight the absence of a South African corpus of academic learner texts. Thereafter, the objectives of the corpus project are outlined. The remainder of the article describes and justifies the design-features of the corpus as well as the process of setting up the data management system to facilitate the collection of the learner texts and their integration with the metadata. We conclude with a summary of the current status of the project, including the limitations, and a preview of the way forward.

摘要

本文概述了设计由南非不同母语的大学生制作的多语种学术文本语料库的过程和初步结果，以期将其用作教学应用和研究的开放资源。我们首先概述全世界出于教学目的的语料库发展的历史，特别着重于学习者语料库，并着重指出南非缺乏学术学习者语料库。此后，概述了语料库项目的目标。本文的其余部分描述并证明了语料库的设计功能以及建立数据管理系统以促进学习者文本的收集及其与元数据的集成的过程。