Learner corpora and World Englishes: A (brief) introduction

Over twenty years ago, Sridhar & Sridhar (1986) called for a rapprochement between Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and the study of indigenised varieties of English (nowadays often referred to as “World Englishes”). While this idea was not followed by any concrete effects for several years, the advent of learner corpora (like the International Corpus of Learner English) and corpora representing indigenised varieties of English (like the International Corpus of English) has provided us with the necessary tools to perform systematic and comprehensive comparisons of Learner Englishes and World Englishes. Studies such as that by Nesselhauf (2009) or those found in Mukherjee & Hundt (forthcoming) show that similarities between the two types of varieties exist and that this line of research is indeed worth pursuing