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Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes
Edited by Alexandra U. Esimaje, Ulrike Gut and Bassey E. Antia
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 88] 2019
► pp. 71–96

Chapter 1.3
The purpose, design and use of the Corpus of Nigerian and Cameroonian English Learner Language (Conacell)

| Benson Idahosa University

This chapter reports on a new learner corpus project, describes its purpose and design, and demonstrates its use: the error-annotated corpus of 442,939 words of Nigerian and Cameroonian English Learner Language (Conacell) (Esimaje 2016). The aim of the project is to produce a resource for measuring learners’ language development and to enhance the teaching-learning process. The corpus data comprises the language output of 998 students; 383 university and 615 secondary students. The specific uses of the corpus to explore lexical form and tense usages by learners in Nigeria and Cameroon are shown. Corpus analysis reveals, for instance, that the lexical form of capitalisation and tense are hard to learn, and therefore remain learning needs in the contexts.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The learner corpus
  • 2.Method and data
    • 2.1Purpose of Conacell
    • 2.2Design of Conacell
      • 2.2.1Size
      • 2.2.2Content
      • 2.2.3Balance
      • 2.2.4Representativeness
    • 2.3Data collection
    • 2.4Corpus annotation
      • Step 1.Collecting the raw data
      • Step 2.Loading files and creating templates
      • Step 3.Transcribing the data
      • Step 4.Annotating the data
      • Step 5.Building the corpus
    • 2.5Conacell structure and metadata
  • 3.Conacell-based studies
    • 3.1Case study 1 (Esimaje 2017)
      • 3.1.1Purpose of study
      • 3.1.2Data and analysis
      • 3.1.3Results
      • 3.1.4Discussion of results
      • 3.1.5Spelling error taxonomy
      • 3.1.6Frequency
      • 3.1.7Context analysis: Concordance of ‘I’
    • 3.2Case study 2 (Esimaje, A. U. & Hunston, S. E. 2016)
      • 3.2.1Purpose of the study
      • 3.2.2Method and analysis
      • 3.2.3Discussion and conclusion
  • 4.Further challenges for Conacell and corpus linguistics in Nigeria and Cameroon
  • 5.Chapter summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 13 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.88.04esi
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