The theme of the latest issue of Research Notes is corpora and language assessment which is becoming more and more important to language testing and of interest to teachers, publishers and other stakeholder groups.
This edition provides an overview of the use of corpora in testing and describes the development of corpus resources while also considering how these and other technological advances (such as Electronic Script Management, ESM) help the understanding of language tests issues. There are several case studies which explore reading texts and spoken data.
A corpus is a language database that typically consists of hundreds of thousands of words from spoken or written texts. It is a highly valuable research resource that enables examining bodies and people interested in language to investigate specific features across different types, varieties or even languages.
Corpora are used to improve the understanding of various issues, for example: how adult speech differs from children’s speech, or how different first language use affects second language speaking or writing.