摘要：At the Department of English, Uppsala University, a corpus of learner English is
currently being compiled. The project has been running for a year – the two academic
terms of 1999 – and is planned to proceed for another two years. The corpus
consists of essays written by the department’s students of English, the
majority in their first term of full-time studies of the subject. The project has
attracted a large number of participants, who hand in their 700-word essays on
diskettes or online to project leaders Margareta Westergren Axelsson and Ylva
Berglund. The present size of the corpus is about 600,000 words. At the current
rate of student participation, we can look forward to a collection of texts comprising
close to two million words by the end of the project period.
