Corpus of Chinese Learner English (CCLE)

Compiled by Ying Wang, with the assistance of Lan Yao at Wuhan University, China. The corpus consists of 560 evaluation and argumentation essays (382, 256 words) written by 263 Chinese third-year undergraduate students of English at Wuhan University. The great majority of the students spoke a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, and most of them had been studying English for about nine or ten years by the time they wrote the essays for this corpus project. The essays were collected between 2005 and 2007. They were written on a set of topics and were finished out of class, against a deadline of two to three weeks. All the subjects were requested to fill in a learner profile questionnaire through which information on variables that may influence learner production (e.g. gender, age, language background, stage of learning, exposure to the target language), was collected and subsequently recorded in the CCLE database. The corpus was compiled in the context of Wang’s doctoral thesis and is aimed to be directly comparable to part of the Uppsala Student English Corpus (USE) in terms of learners’ proficiency level, essay topic and task setting. It can therefore serve to make contrastive studies of Chinese and Swedish learner English. Below are a tiny part of concordances run for the verb TAKE in both the CCLE and the USE corpora to give a glimpse of the two comparable learner corpora being used.

CCLE
would gain a sense of achievement through taking charge of a business. Because they
adaptable, some university students have taken part in business-founding; no matter
standard. After work, women have to take good care of their families while men
have to have an interview when want to take part in a club or a corporation. You
and ruthless, measures should be taken to change the society’s value and
our life and even our character. In taking part of it, we lose more than we
and assume the responsibilities to take care of them. Although the experiment
of time and money shortage. Should they take chances to spend more time
and soon anti-boycotting actions will be taken in our country: all that country’s

USE
people might argue that they would feel taken advantage of and be used as free
to why I see it as an urgent issue to take a decision now. One can wonder how
arranged to deter as many as possibly to take a loan. This is a problem and
Also, it can be even more difficult to take care of a person if he is handicapp
found to be corrupted in meaning to take advantages, or benefit on behalf of
but the neighbouring countries could take offence, and a regional rearmament
upon what can be done about deprevation taking place every day, as well as a
geriatric-care benefit when the family takes care of their elderly. That would
upbringing. Consequently both should take even part in its life. Although