This volume is a collection of conference papers on learner language from a learner corpus research perspective. Most learner corpus research relies on contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA). An extension of this model is Granger’s (Reference Granger, Aijmer, Altenberg and Johansson1996) integrated contrastive model (ICM), which combines CIA with contrastive analysis. This approach is reviewed by Gilquin in the first of two methodological chapters, in which she proposes a model for the detection and evaluation of transfer, which further extends Granger’s ICM by adding a component of first language (L1)-interlanguage comparison. Corpus comparability, a crucial methodological issue, is the focus of Ädel’s chapter, in which she demonstrates that features of second language (L2) writing that have often been ascribed to lack of register awareness may actually be due to features of task design, such as planning and access to sources.

The remaining chapters focus on learner lexis, syntax, and discourse. Most studies adopt the CIA or the ICM approach, and, like the case studies in Gilquin and Ädel, are based on subcorpora of the international corpus of learner English, a corpus of L2 English argumentative writing by university students from 25 different L1 backgrounds. In the only chapter devoted to learner lexis, Cross and Papp compare the use of verb-plus-noun combinations in argumentative writing by Chinese, German, and Greek L1 learners. Chinese learners were found to be less creative and used structures that suggest reliance on memorized chunks. Lozano and Mendikoetxea compare the production of postverbal subjects in the argumentative writing of Spanish and Italian students, whereas Osborne investigates the factors that affect adverb placement in L2 writing by postintermediate learners from various L1 backgrounds. Findings revealed that adverb placement is affected by learner L1, with speakers of verb-raising Romance languages favoring verb-adverb-object placement over speakers of Germanic and Slavic languages. Díez-Bedmar and Papp’s study of article use in the English writing of L1 Chinese and Spanish learners shows that Chinese learners exhibit more nonnativelike traits than do Spanish learners. Cosme tests the hypothesis that advanced French and Dutch learners’ underuse of participial constructions might be due to transfer, given that French and Dutch generally use these constructions less than English does.

In the first of three chapters on learner discourse, Callies examines raising constructions—a topic that might be best regarded as syntax—in L2 English writing by advanced German and Polish learners and finds that all types of raising constructions are underrepresented and used in nontargetlike ways. Hannay and Martínez Caro investigate the textual discourse competence of Spanish and Dutch learners of English, by comparing their level of exploitation of the English clause in the theme zone. Dutch learners at all levels appeared more sophisticated in their exploitation of the thematic options of English—that is, in terms of structural options, syntactic devices associated with them, and semantic and rhetorical exploitation of those options. Demol and Hadermann investigate patterns of discourse organization in written narratives by Belgian L1 Dutch learners of French and L1 French learners of Dutch. Adopting an ICM approach, Dutch and French interlanguage is compared with native Dutch and French writing; discourse organization is examined through a number of measures of syntactic complexity (e.g., sentence length, degree of subordination vs. coordination, degree of integration of hypotactic structures). Surprisingly, the most salient differences in discourse patterns of French and Dutch narrative writing were found in the use of nonfinite clauses rather than in the degree of packaging and subordination.

Overall, the contributions in this collection provide an excellent overview of the developments of learner corpus research, a discipline that, although growing steadily, appears to have remained trapped in the comparative fallacy—an approach to learner language that relies almost exclusively on notions of transfer and underuse or overuse and on contrastive models such as CIA and ICM. This volume will be of interest mostly to researchers interested in advanced learner writing; more sifting and interpretation of the findings seems necessary before the implications of the research in these chapters can be fruitfully accessed by language teachers.