ICNALE: International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English

The ICNALE Online
Last updated 2012/03/05

The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English is a one-million-words learner corpus open to the public. It collects controlled essays written by learners in eight countries and areas in Asia as well as those by English native speakers. The ICNALE is a reliable database for international contrastive interlanguage analysis. The ICNALE Project is led by Dr. Shin'ichiro Ishikawa of Kobe University, Japan, and partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture of Japan, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), 2010-2013, No. 22320104.... More

About the ICNALE

1. What is the ICNALE?
The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English or The ICNALE is one of the largest learner corpora open to the public. The ICNALE is designed as a reliable database for international contrastive interlanguage analysis. The ICNALE Project is led by Dr. Shin'ichiro Ishikawa of Kobe University, Japan, and partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture of Japan, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), 2010-2013, No. 22320104.

2. What features does the ICNALE have?
1) Focus on Asian Learners
The ICNALE includes the essay data of NNS college students in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Pakistan, as well as model essays written by English native speakers. The ICNALE covers all of the three types of English users in Inner Circle, Outer Circle, and Expanding Circle (Kachru, 1992).

2) Control on Writing Conditions
The number of the topics is limited only to two, enabling a reliable contrastive analysis. The topics are "It is important for college students to have a part time job." and "Smoking should be completely banned at all the restaurants in the country."The numbers of the part time job essays and the non-smoking essays are the same in the corpus. Also, the parameters such as time (20 to 40 mins), length (200-300 words), dictionary use (prohibited), and use of spell check (mandatory), are strictly controlled.

3) Free distribution
You can freely access the corpus via a user-friendly online interface, which supports (a) the KWIC search, (b) the collocation search, (c) the word list compilation, (d) the keywords search. As all the data is POS-tagged, you can search the word used as a particular part of speech.

3. Licence

ICNALE Online is licensed under a Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

4. Reference
Ishikawa, S. (2011). A New horizon in learner corpus studies: The aim of the ICNALE project. In G. Weir, S. Ishikawa, & K. Poonpon (Eds.), Corpora and language technologies in teaching, learning and research (pp.3-11). Glasgow, UK: University of Strathclyde Publishing. Download the file.

5. Original Data
Original data (plain/ tagged texts) is offered only to researchers. Please contact Dr. Ishikawa for obtaining a password. -> ICNALE_201203.zip
Japanese essay module data is also now available. Download the file.