Innovation in Language Learning

Learner corpora are systematic collections of language data produced by learners of a second or foreign language. They offer valuable insights into learner language, enabling the empirical study of interlanguage - the dynamic linguistic system that learners construct during the process of language acquisition (Tono, 2003; Aarts & Granger, 1998). This study presents the design and development of a learner corpus of written Italian, compiled from texts produced by Greek university students at CEFR levels B and C. Learner corpora focusing on Italian, particularly within the context of Greek learners, remain scarce. The primary objective of this corpus is to investigate interlanguage development through detailed error analysis. Annotation is conducted using a custom-designed tagset, specifically developed to meet the analytical requirements of the corpus. Given the increasing interest in the teaching and learning of Italian, this corpus addresses a significant gap in learner corpus resources and contributes to the broader understanding of Italian L2 acquisition within Greek-speaking contexts. Furthermore, the corpus has potential applications in pedagogical material development and in advancing research in Second Language Acquisition. Ultimately, this project aims to shed light on how Greek learners approach the acquisition of Italian and to offer a replicable model for learner corpus construction in underrepresented language pairings.