The International Corpus of Learner English Project (ICLE)
An international corpus of writing(1) by advanced(2) learners of English as a Foreign
Language(3). This corpus consists of several sub-corpora, each representing a
language variety (E2French, E2German, E2Swedish etc.).
(1) The type of writing collected is essay writing.
(2) Advanced students can, for the purposes of the project, be broadly defined as
university students of English in their 3rd or 4th year of study.
(3) A distinction is made here between English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and
English as a Second Language (ESL).
(4) sub-corpus size: min. 200,000 words, single contribution max. 1,000 words
(5) mostly argumentative essays; some literature papers – the distinction carefully
coded
(6) each author has been questionnaired so custom sub-corpora can be selfcompiled