The development of a Chinese learner corpus

A learner corpus is a very important resource for research on second language acquisition. In this paper, the design and development of a Chinese learner corpus is described. The corpus is based on compositions by learners from 59 countries. The procedure of the development of the corpus is reported, including coping, proofing, etc. Information such as type of writing, student number, time of writing, Chinese language proficiency level is recorded. The corpus will be helpful in teaching syllabus compilation, textbook development and dictionary compilation, etc.