Call for papers (extended submission deadline):  31 January 2026

The Learner Corpus Research Conference 2026 (LCR 2026) will be held in the beautiful and historically rich city of Prague on 16–19 September 2026. Organized biennially under the auspices of the Learner Corpus Association, the upcoming conference is hosted by the Department of Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. The event is co-organized by two of its constituent units: the Department of English Language and ELT Methodology and the Czech National Corpus.

The conference, titled Forging the Future of Learner Corpus Research, reflects a dual awareness: of the field’s substantial legacy and of the pressing need to embrace emerging technological and methodological innovations. It also highlights the importance of identifying new directions and developing fresh perspectives in learner corpus studies.

The conference theme resonates with the extensive experience and pioneering contributions of the Czech National Corpus, which has been shaping standards in corpus linguistics for over three decades. Moreover, the Faculty of Arts and its linguistics departments are deeply rooted in the tradition of the Prague Linguistic Circle, and they previously hosted the 38th ICAME conference in 2017.

Further information about previous LCR conferences can be found here. Details regarding the Learner Corpus Association’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Conduct statements are available here.

• View the full program here: LCRGrad25 Program
• Access the official Book of Abstracts here: LCRGrad25 Book of Abstracts

The main aim of the conference, as in the previous editions, is to offer a space for MA and PhD students as well as researchers who have earned their doctoral degree in the last two years prior to the conference to discuss their (ongoing) projects. Researchers who already hold a doctoral degree are welcome and strongly encouraged to attend as panelists, mentors or non-presenting delegates, helping to ensure a fruitful academic dialogue and to foster the careers of graduate students and recent graduates within the field of Learner Corpus Research.

The central theme of this year’s conference is “The Pattern Beneath”. This theme celebrates the unique role of learner corpus research in uncovering the underlying structures and patterns of learner language through LCR. It emphasizes the field’s potential to provide insights into second language acquisition, linguistic development, and the intricacies of language use in educational contexts.

The registration form and all further information can be found on the conference website: https://lcrgrad2025.tu-chemnitz.de

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Prof. Dr. Randi Reppen: Professor Emerita of Applied Linguistics and TESL at Northern Arizona University

Prof. Dr. Michaela Mahlberg: Professor of Digital Humanities, Alexander-von-Humboldt Professor at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Dr. Dana Gablasova: Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University

IMPORTANT DATES

Additional highlights of LCRGrad25:

• Registration is free of charge for all participants.
• Sessions will be hosted on Zoom, ensuring accessibility for participants world-wide.
• To accommodate participants from various time zones, the conference will adopt a flexible and inclusive schedule.
• Ask-Me-Anything Panels and Research Consultation Clinics with leading experts.
• Interactive sessions connecting Early Career Researchers and Senior Academics.
• Networking opportunities via virtual coffee chats.
• Awards and recognitions for best paper and best poster.
• Soft skills workshops: Hands-on sessions to enhance skills like publishing, career planning, data visualization, and networking.

We look forward to your participation in this exciting virtual gathering, where we aim to advance the learner corpus research together!

Further information

Contact us via e-mail: lcrgrad@tu-chemnitz.de

This initiative follows the successful release of the second version of the Core Metadata Schema for Learner Corpora (LC-meta), a milestone that reflects our collective commitment to advancing the field. To understand the rationale behind LC-meta, we invite you to read our recently published open-access article in the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.24010.paq.

Open-access publication on the Core Metadata Schema for Learner Corpora (LC-meta) (https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.24010.paq)

Alternatively, if you prefer listening to a lecture, you can tune into a talk given by M. Paquot at the Corpus Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 2023 online seminar series: https://www.um.es/languagecorpora/2023/09/14/the-core-metadata-schema-for-l2-data/.

The schema itself is downloadable at: https://doi.org/10.14428/DVN/AAUEM2.

Core Metadata Schema for Learner Corpora (https://doi.org/10.14428/DVN/AAUEM2)

The Working Group will focus on evaluating and further refining the metadata schema, facilitating broader adoption, and exploring innovative solutions to metadata-related challenges in learner corpus research. It will also work towards integrating the schema into relevant infrastructures and developing user-friendly interfaces. We believe that by working together, we can significantly enhance the quality, accessibility, and impact of learner corpora.

As a first step, we invite all interested members of the LCA and the broader research community to join us at LCR2024 at the University of Tartu, Estonia, 26-28 September 2024. Jennifer-Carmen Frey will provide more information during the General Assembly. She will also be available during the poster session when the UCLouvain team presents the CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Learner Corpora.

Further details on how to get involved will also be shared after the conference. Stay tuned! We look forward to your active participation and to collectively driving forward this important aspect of learner corpus research.

The SweLL corpus is a newly compiled and manually annotated corpus of essays written by adult learners of Swedish as a second language. Essays have been manually pseudonymized,  normalized, and correction annotated. Various tools have been developed to support the process of annotation, annotation management and search, notably a possibility to explore original and corrected data in a parallel fashion. Welcome to the release of both the corpus and the tools that will be presented by the SweLL project team!

The event will also feature two invited speakers:

• Brian MacWhinney, Carnegie Mellon Univeersity, USA
• Tove Larsson, Uppsala University, Sweden & Northern Arizona University, USA

Please, register! The registration is free of charge and is necessary to send you links to the Zoom webinar.

The work on the infrastructure was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of Kari Tenfjord, Professor of Norwegian as a second language at the University of Bergen, who passed away on 4 October 2020. Kari was an active member of the learner corpus research community. She was the academic leader of the ASK Corpus, a learner corpus of Norwegian as a Second Language made up of writing from adult immigrant learners of Norwegian as a second language. Her research focused on the development and use of Norwegian as a second language, with a particular focus on crosslinguistic influence and a special emphasis on the acquisition of tense. In 2013 she organized the second Learner Corpus Research conference in Bergen. She brought meticulous care to organising the conference, and those who attended remember with great fondness the warm welcome she extended to each and every participant. She was a colleague who effortlessly combined scholarly excellence with natural modesty and great human warmth. Her kindness, her friendliness and her radiant smile will be sadly missed.

we are glad to announce that the Corpora and Language in Use’s 5^th volume of proceedings entitled “Widening the Scope of Learner Corpus Research” has been recently published. It includes selected papers  from the Fourth Learner Corpus Research Conference held in Bolzano/Bozen.

You can find more information at this link: Publication

We wish you a pleasant reading.

Best regards,

Andrea & team

Andrea Abel

Eurac Research

Institutsleiterin/Direttrice d’istituto/Head of Institute

Institut für Angewandte Sprachforschung/Istituto di linguistica applicata/Institute for Applied Linguistics

T +39 0471 055 121

andrea.abel@eurac.edu

Drususallee/Viale Druso 1

I-39100 Bozen/Bolzano

www.eurac.edu

Provisional programme

MORNING: discussing our results

9 00 opening N. Ballier The Ulysse PHC project : aims, data and limitations

9.20 Thomas Gaillat investigating learner micro-systems and customizing CEFR criterial features : the micro-system feature set and its regex syntax

9h40 discussion

10h30 Bernardo Stearns (tbc) and Annanda Sousa : the user interface prototype demo
We hope to deliver a docker and a github version of our user interface that allows you to paste a text, have a coffee while the text is processed and then get the probability of the text of being of a given CEFR level.

10h45 Discussion

11h 15 Andrew Simpkins : overfitting ? comparison with a graded corpus
As a preliminary step, we have tested our current User Interface with the CEFR ASAG corpus to check whether our model is biased to the A1 level.

11H30 General discussion

12 15 LUNCH BREAK (poster session at Diderot)
Poster displayed at Diderot and on a shared google drive for distant participants (titles tbc).
Thomas Gaillat : the Viz project for visualing metrics
Carlos Balhana (Cambridge) : Grammatical Error Correction and Interlanguage Event Representation
Vinogradova et al : a module for punctuation with the REALEC data
Vinogradova et al : the REALEC web interface : data, activities, technologies
Volodina et al. A System Architecture for Intelligent CALL examples of NLP approaches to Swedish
Nikolay Babakov : recommandation system for CEFR-indexed texts (from Russian to English ?)
O’Donnell et al. The concept approach to learner errors (incl details on data, NLP techiques used)

AFTERNOON: Learner corpora and beyond: collecting and interpreting learning process and product data

A blueprint is to be circulated pointing out potential future directions.

13h30 STRAND 1 Adding more metrics/NLP-based methods for error detection / problematic areas for learners

15h STRAND 2 Exploring the relation between Learner corpus annotation, language testing, and individual feedback to learners

16h30 coffee break

17h STRAND3 Should we try to link learner corpus and learning analytics research – and what is there to be gained? Ideas for Tracking Development path ? (Fuchs, Götz & Werner 2016) How to develop learner profiles based on student input?

1815 closing remarks and future plans

1830 end of the workshop

Call for participation

As a closing event of a European-funded project, we invite colleagues to share their ideas about the automatic analysis of learner corpora and how they can be applied towards interlanguage analysis, CEFR level prediction, and error detection – and extended to support individual feedback to learners and learning analytics.

The morning session will present some of the results of this French-Irish project “PHC Ulysse 2019”: the features of the EFCAMDAT corpus we used as the first step for our experiments, the methodology we developed, and our main findings. We will present our prototype of user interface for automatic detection of CEFR levels and discuss aspects such as overfitting of a model based on the French and Spanish components of EFCAMDAT. We will also discuss the shared task we held on a portion of this

We will discuss posters over lunch recapitulating some of the issues. Poster presenters are asked to send their A0 PDF to nicolas.ballier@univ-diderot.fr by Oct 15th midnight, summarizing their approach, which may include results previously presented. The afternoon functions as a round table intended to build collaborations and extensions of our project and discuss potential work packages for a follow-up project. Invited colleagues will summarize their methodologies and share their views on possible next steps.

Admission is free but registration is compulsory (on a first come, first served basis) on this webpage: https://framaforms.org/20191030-workshop-beyond-cefr-level-prediction-of-texts-in-learner-corpora-1570435104

The summary of the Ulysse PHC Project can be found here : http://www.clillac-arp.univ-paris-diderot.fr/projets/ulysse2019

Discussants at Diderot :

Taylor Arnold (University of Richmond, https://math.richmond.edu/faculty/tarnold2) is Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Richmond and has a strong interest in NLP as a data scientist and digital humanist, see https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.11099

Detmar Meurers (University of Tübingen, http://purl.org/dm) is Professor of Computational Linguistics and head of the research group on Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning there: http://icall-research.de

Contact person:
Nicolas Ballier : nicolas.ballier@univ-paris-diderot.fr