Russian Learner Corpora Research: State of the Art and Call for Action

Abstract

With the increase in availability and user-friendliness of Russian language corpora and corpus-analytic tools, the field of Russian language education has recently begun to employ corpus linguistics as an approach to understanding the dynamic of language development in users of Russian as a second and heritage language. The paper provides a brief overview of the current state of learner corpus research as a field and explores the benefits of application of corpus linguistics methods and instruments to the study of Russian. The paper reviews pertinent issues in corpora design, compilation, and annotation; offers an overview of the existing Russian language corpora and reports on the currently available corpus-based studies of Russian as a second/heritage language. The paper concludes with a call to the field to explore the benefit of corpus-based approaches to the study of Russian.