May 6-7, 2027 – Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy
Modern societies are increasingly characterised by multilingual realities. Migration and transnational exchange have led to highly heterogeneous, “superdiverse” societies (Blommaert & Rampton 2011; Vertovec 2007), in which individuals routinely draw on multiple linguistic resources from their repertoires, including national, regional, minority, heritage and other acquired languages.
In recent years, disciplines concerned with language learning—such as Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Third Language Acquisition (TLA) and multilingual acquisition research—have increasingly recognised that learners of additional languages are often plurilingual individuals embedded in multilingual contexts (e.g. Riehl & Schroeder 2025; Sánchez 2020; De Angelis 2007; Puig-Mayecano, Gonzáles & Rothman 2018). This shift has also been reflected in learner corpus research (LCR). A growing body of work (e.g. Wulff 2017, 2023; Gilquin 2022; Frey 2025; Lopopolo et al. 2025) highlights the importance of taking learners’ multilingual backgrounds into account in both the design and analysis of learner corpora.
While most learner corpora are organised around a single target language, multilingual approaches are gaining ground. These include corpora that cover multiple target languages to enable cross-linguistic comparison (e.g. SWIKO, Hicks & Studer 2024; MLC, Tagnin 2006), as well as more rare but particularly valuable corpora that contain productions in multiple languages by the same learners (e.g. LEONIDE, Glaznieks et al. 2022; TRAWL, Dirdal et al. 2022). At the same time, there is still no consensus on what exactly constitutes a “multilingual learner corpus”, and research questions and methodological approaches vary widely (e.g. Hasselgård & Oksefjell Ebeling 2018; Dirdal & Vold 2025; Ferraresi & Bernardini 2023).
This workshop aims to bring together researchers working at the intersection of multilingualism and learner corpus research, and to foster discussion on theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues in this emerging field.
We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:
- conceptualisations and definitions of multilingual learner corpora
- design, compilation, and annotation of multilingual learner corpora
- methodological challenges in capturing multilingual learner profiles
- comparable developmental pathways across languages
- cross-linguistic influence and transfer
- multilingual speaking, writing and translation practices
- plurilingual competence and repertoire-based approaches
- longitudinal perspectives on multilingual development
- pedagogical implications of multilingual learner corpus research
- innovative methods and tools for analysing multilingual learner data
- multilingual learner corpus data in mixed methods designs
Confirmed keynote speakers
Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
University of Oslo, Norway
Submission guidelines
Please submit anonymized abstracts of max. 300 words (excluding references) in English via ConfTool (https://lt.eurac.edu/mlcr27/conftool/). Submissions will be subject to blind peer-review.
Please include:
- title of the paper
- 3–5 keywords
- anonymised abstract
Important dates
- Abstract submission deadline: October 15, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: December 15, 2026
- Workshop dates: May 6–7, 2027
Format
The workshop will include paper presentations (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion) and a poster session.
Contact
Organisers: Aivars Glaznieks and Jennifer-Carmen Frey (Eurac Research Bolzano)
Email: porta@eurac.edu
References
Blommaert, J. & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and Superdiversity. In: Diversities 13(2).
De Angelis, G. (2007). Third or Additional Language Acquisition. Multilingual Matters.
Dirdal, H., Hasund, I. K., Drange, E.-M., Vold, E. T., & Berg, E. M. (2022). Design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) corpus: A longitudinal and multilingual young learner corpus. Nordic Journal of Language Teaching and Learning, 10(2), 115–135. https://doi.org/10.46364/njltl.v10i2.1005.
Dirdal, H. & Vold, E. T. (2025). Investigating writing development, cross-linguistic influence and feedback practices through a longitudinal corpus of children’s school writing. Applied Corpus Linguistics 5(2), 100131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2025.100131.
Frey, J.-C. (2025). Analysing child writing in multilingual contexts: Combining corpora, computational tools, and methods for crossing the borders of monolingual studies on communicative competence. Applied Corpus Linguistics 5(3), 100158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2025.100158
Gilquin, G. (2022). Translanguaging and data-driven learning: How corpora can help leverage learners’ multilingual repertoires. Teaching English as a Second Language Electronic Journal (TESL-EJ), 26 (3). https://doi.org/10.55593/ej.26103a22
Glaznieks, A., Frey, J.-C., Stopfner, M., Zanasi, L., & Nicolas, L. (2022). LEONIDE: A longitudinal trilingual cor-pus of young learners of Italian, German and English. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 8(1), 97–120. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.21004.gla.
Hasselgård, H. & Oksefjell Ebeling, S. (2018). At the interface between Contrastive Analysis and Learner Corpus Research: A parallel contrastive approach. Nordic Journal of English Studies 17(2), 82-214.
Hicks, N. S. & Studer, T. (2024): Language corpus research meets foreign language education: examples from the multilingual SWIKO corpus. Babylonia Multilingual Journal of Language Education 2, 26-35.
Lopopolo, O., Bienati, A., Frey, J.-C., Glaznieks, A. & Spina, S. (2025). Categorising speakers’ language background: Theoretical assumptions and methodological challenges for learner corpus research. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 4 (1), 100170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rmal.2024.100170
Puig-Mayenco, E., González Alonso, J. & Rothman, J. (2018). A systematic review of transfer studies in third language acquisition. Second Language Research 36 (1), 31-64, https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658318809147
Sánchez, L. (2020). Multilingualism from a language acquisition perspective. In C. Bardel & L. Sánchez (eds.), Third language acquisition: Age, proficiency and multilingualism, 15–41. Berlin: Language Science Press. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4138735
Riehl, C. M. & Schroeder, C. (2025). DaF/DaZ im Kontext von Mehrsprachigkeit. In: Zeitschrift Deutsch als Fremdsprache 59(2), 67-76.
Tagnin, S. E. O. (2006). A multilingual learner corpus in Brazil. In A. Wilson, D. Archer & P. Rayson (eds.), Corpus Linguistics Around the World, 195–202. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6), 1024-1054.
Wulff, S. (2017). What learner corpus research can contribute to multilingualism research. International Journal of Bilingualism 21 (6), 734-753.
Wulff, S. (2023). Corpus Research. In J. Cabrelli, A. Chaouch-Orozco, J. González Alonso, S. M. Pereira Soares, E. Puig-Mayenco & J. Rothman (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Third Language Acquisition, 683-695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.