HSE Student at the International Research Seminar at Université Catholique de Louvain

On September 8-12, 2014 Elizaveta Kuzmenko, third-year student of Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (Faculty of Philology) took part in an international seminar at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). The event was dedicated to research projects based on materials of the learner corpus and titled ‘Learner Corpus Research Summer School’.

Learner corpus is made up of texts created by those who learn a particular language, but who are not native speakers. Usually specialists in second language acquisition describe the way a particular person learns a foreign language. Learner corpus helps analyze this process from different points of view and determines the patterns of learning while examining voluminous materials. These materials help compile grammar exercises based on corpus data.

The programme of the seminar included:

• a colloquium, during which each participant presented his or her project;
• lectures on learner corpus research methods, sources of errors, phraseology and grammatical structures in the texts of foreign language learners;
• individual interviews with recognized experts in linguistics;
• workshops on creating corpora and error markup.

At the colloquium Elizaveta presented a corpus essay in English, written by the students. It aroused great interest in the audience, and she received many valuable tips and advice on how to improve and develop the project.

The event helped young researchers gain new ideas and find out about the latest trends in learner corpus research.