Constructing a blog corpus for Japanese learners of English

Researchers have directed increased attention to the building and analysing of written learner corpora – databases of written language produced by language learners – to address issues such as the words that non-native learners of English use in their writing, and how their word use differs from that of native speakers. This paper offers an initial look at a new written learner corpus, currently under construction, which is composed of lower/intermediate-level learner blogs. Preliminary data from the corpus regarding high-frequency vocabulary use is compared to frequency lists from the British National Corpus in order to illustrate basic usage differences.