Anna M. Gates, Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja, ECUADOR

Introduction

Ecuador Population: 14,573,101

Academic requirement High school (X weekly) University (approx. 320 hours)

No publically or academically available learner corpora Ecuadorian learners of English.

Commercial corpora represent Ecuadorian learners with a mere 117,100 words

Little linguistic research, no corpus research

Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja 28,000 students nationwide in

distance education English teacher training program

1,200 students in distance program 60 students on site Faculty: 23 Ecuadorians, 4 foreign

Membership in English teacher association

Ecuadorian English Learner Corpus (EELC) Design Objectives

Comparable with the Spanish subcorpora of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE)

Representative of the distinct geographical regions of Ecuador.

EELC Methods

Creation of candidate database Proficient to advanced English learners

English teaching majors in their final year of study

English major alumni Current practicing English teachers Individuals with interest in joining a Master

degree program in teaching English as a foreign language.

Determining Proficiency

Collection of demographic information Duration and quality of English language

exposure Writing samples

Data Collection

June 2010 Candidates sent an online survey (Lime

Survey) Demographic information Request for an argumentative essay (700

and 1000 words) To improve response rates, candidates

were offered an incentive for their participation. This method was chosen to minimize data collection costs and to reach a wide geographical range within Ecuador.

The Corpus

Software AntConc 3.2.1

Concordancer Word and keyword frequency generators Tools for cluster and lexical bundle analysis Word distribution plot, Support for regular expressions Freeware

CLAWS4 POS-tagger High rate of accuracy Robustness Advantage for making comparative analysis

with other corpora tagged with CLAWS4.

•279 Lime Survey invitations made•24 (8,6%) responses to the survey•19 (6,81%) complete•5 (1.79) only partial

RESULTS CONTINUEDRESULTS CONTINUED

• Words Collected• GOAL: 250,000• Collected to date: 8060

Alternative strategies

Current students Request professor assistence Extra credit points

English Teachers Participation in national conferences Dedicated meeting

Others Site partners Promotional campaign

Proposed Projects

Collocation analysis Preposition use Study of register in immigrant

returnees

Universidad Técnica Particular de LojaEcuadorian English Learner Corpus