The opening keynote at #VAR4LCR is by none other than the master of register variation, Doug Biber, on "Grammatical complexity in L2 writing development: Contrasting oral versus literate complexity across registers and
developmental levels", himself introduced by the doyenne of learner corpus research, Sylviane Granger. Doug showed us lots of heat maps illustrating bottom-up patterns of co-occurrences of complexity features in English L2 writing based on recent work by himself, Tove Larsson and Greg Hancock, e.g., https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2025-0017.
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The opening keynote at #VAR4LCR is by none other than the master of register variation, Doug Biber, on "Grammatical complexity in L2 writing development: Contrasting oral versus literate complexity across registers and
developmental levels", himself introduced by the doyenne of learner corpus research, Sylviane Granger. Doug showed us lots of heat maps illustrating bottom-up patterns of co-occurrences of complexity features in English L2 writing based on recent work by himself, Tove Larsson and Greg Hancock, e.g., https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2025-0017.
The first research talk #VAR4LCR is presented by Valentin Werner and Lisa-Christine Altendorf on "Register and task variation in young German learner English: A (quasi-)longitudinal look at complexity". Find out more about the project here: https://www.iaak.uni-bonn.de/bael/en/research/young-german-learner-english @corpuslinguistics#EFL#SLA
Next up #VAR4LCR María Belén Díez-Bedmar is speaking on "Exploring task type effects on L2 accuracy profiles: Narrative vs. email writing by B1 Spanish EFL learners". This study is based on the FineDesc Learner Corpus, which is a manually error-tagged controlled corpus of 200 texts written by 100 Spanish EFL learners that allows for many interesting comparisons: https://web.ujaen.es/investiga/finedesc/index.php.
- FineDesc
Learner corpus
> Collaboration of 7 University Language Centres (accredited by CertAcles)
• L1 Spanish, but considering co-official languages
> Status of English (EFL1, EFL2, ESL, etc.)
> Attendance (or not) to a preparation course
• Register, text type, main illocutionary force, topic
L2 accuracy criterial features: narrative writing vs email writing at B1 level
Fine Desc
Large effect size
Narrative writing
Email writing
• Indefinite pronouns
• Adverb position
• Incorrect marking of number in
• Unclear passages
adjectives
Medium to large effect size
• Subject-verb agreement
• Verb morphology
Tense and aspect
• Word class selection
Dependent prepositions on verbs
• Verb voice errors
• Indefinite determiners
• Possessive determiners
Small to medium effect size
• Spelling
• Adjective selection
• Verb selection
• Use of incorrect punctuation
Coming in that difficult slot just before lunch #VAR4LCR, Marylise Rilliard is presenting collaborative work on "Task-based variation in L2 French: Does orthography influence the realization of final consonants?". Very happy to see learner corpus research on a language other than English! And even more happy that that language is French!! 😊
Doug Biber is back at the lectern #VAR4LCR together with Taehyeong (Terry) Kim to present: "Exploring the intersection of phraseological complexity and grammatical complexity: Do lexical phrases develop into grammatical
structures as learners begin to produce specialized written registers?".
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