The Xi’an Multi-Language Learner Corpus
| Item Name: | The Xi’an Multi-Language Learner Corpus |
| Author(s): | Xiao Zhang, Ling Zhang, Tian Dang, Yuanzhao Feng, Yujing Ji, Xiaohui Jiang, Zhewen Kang, Yan Lu, Wen Nie, Hanyu Ren, Canjun Wang, Jiayi Wang, Yu Wang, Chen Wu, Mei Wu, Tingting Xu, Ruhai Yang, Kai Zhao, Ran Zhao, Quanjie Zhou, Lei Zhu |
| LDC Catalog No.: | LDC2025T03 |
| ISLRN: | 615-404-265-320-6 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/r333-vr13 |
| Release Date: | March 17, 2025 |
| Member Year(s): | 2025 |
| DCMI Type(s): | Text |
| Data Source(s): | essays |
| Application(s): | cross-linguistic comparison, language learning |
| Language(s): | Arabic, Filipino, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Malay, Persian, Russian, Swahili, Thai, Turkish, Urdu |
| Language ID(s): | ara, fil, eng, fra, deu, hin, ind, kor, msa, fas, rus, swa, tha, tur, urd |
| License(s): |
LDC User Agreement for Non-Members |
| Online Documentation: | LDC2025T03 Documents |
| Licensing Instructions: | Subscription & Standard Members, and Non-Members |
| Citation: | Zhang, Xiao, et al. The Xi’an Multi-Language Learner Corpus LDC2025T03. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2025. |
| Related Works: | View |
Introduction
The Xi’an Multi-Language Learner Corpus was developed by Xi'an International Studies University (XISU). It is comprised of 526 argumentative essays in 15 languages by Chinese L1 university students studying second languages, along with student metadata and writing prompts. It was developed to support second language learner research and to provide a database for cross-linguistic comparison of second languages.
Data
The essays were produced by undergraduate students at XISU and Yunnan Minzu University (YMU) in response to writing prompts prepared by the corpus development team. Data was collected in 2023 and 2024. Participating students were linguistic majors or studying one of the foreign languages available at XISU and YMU. Off-topic essays and incomplete texts were excluded
All texts were cleaned and formatted. No changes were made to the texts in relation to grammatical tense or turn of phrase accuracy.
Text and token counts by language are as follows:
| Language | texts | tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Arabic | 8 | 1,762 |
| English | 107 | 32,822 |
| Filipino | 10 | 1,371 |
| French | 129 | 39,944 |
| German | 78 | 10,941 |
| Hindi | 16 | 2,972 |
| Indonesian | 14 | 2,630 |
| Korean | 24 | 2,630 |
| Malay | 36 | 5,208 |
| Persian | 12 | 1,751 |
| Russian | 33 | 8,018 |
| Swahili | 10 | 1,840 |
| Thai | 12 | 1,661 |
| Turkish | 22 | 3,719 |
| Urdu | 15 | 3,645 |
LancsBox X 4.0 was used for counting Swahili, Persian, French, Urdu, and Hindi tokens. AntConc 4.2.4 was used for counting tokens in the other languages.
The essays and writing prompts are stored in UTF-8 encoded plain text files. Metadata is presented in .csv files.
Samples
Sample text file (French)
Updates
None at this time