ABSTRACT
Corpus-based research of learner English and English as a lingua franca (ELF) are both well established. This chapter discusses the underlying tenets of each field. Corpus analyses of learner essay writing dominated the field in its early days with far fewer investigations carried out on spoken English, a development which contrasts with initiatives in ELF research where spoken academic corpora were the focus of attention. While ELF corpora and learner corpora of disciplinary writing adhere to principled guidelines for their corpus construction, the make-up of ELF and learner corpora and the purposes for their compilation and subsequent analyses are quite different. The main criticism levelled against learner corpus research centres on the contrastive interlanguage approach model and the question of native speaker norms as the target language. A comparison of learner and ELF corpus research of disciplinary writing shows that the issue of native-speaker norms is a debated topic in both fields.
