Building a Singapore Learner Corpus of English Writing for Pedagogy

This paper documents the development of a Singapore learner corpus of English writing for pedagogy, which has been constructed at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. This corpus comprises sample English artefacts produced by students at 3 levels, i.e. Primary 6 (Year 6), Secondary 4 (Year 10) and Junior College 2 (Year 12). It is built to capture and compare learners’ developmental features in terms of vocabulary, grammar and discoursal devices at different learning stages and therefore theorize on the nature of English writing development of learners in Singapore. The texts are tagged with meta information of learners’ school level, gender, ethnic group and grade. Issues of corpus design, e.g. representativeness in sampling, are also addressed. Finally, pedagogical implications and potential applications of the project are presented.