NOCE Ana Díaz Negrillo Detmar Meurers Salvador Valera Hernández Holger Wunsch Initial Release NOCE Team
http://purl.org/icall/noce
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/es/

This corpus contains written learner language by Spanish students of English at the universities of Granada and Jaén.

Handwritten compositions by university students. The compositions were typed up verbatim, and students' editions of their writing were encoded in editorial tags.

The corpus was compiled and tagged for research into SLA, FLT and NLP. It builds on a section compiled and error-tagged with EARS for Ana Díaz Negrillo's PhD dissertation, documented in "A Fine-grained Error Tagger for Learner Corpora" (2007) and in "EARS: a User's Manual" (2009). The present project includes extension of the original corpus, XML-encoding of the texts and editorial tags, addition of TEI-conformant headers, upgrading of the original error tags and POS annotation of the corpus.

The corpus includes material mainly from the 1st year students of English at the universities of Granada (years 2002-2004 and 2007-2009) and Jan (years 2007-2009). The text collection was organised as a voluntary classroom activity run at three different points through the academic year (beginning-middle-end). In the task learners picked up one of the fourth options in the task sheet, which contained three topics for argumentative writing and one for free-writing. The corpus collection procedures are further documented in Ana Díaz Negrillo's PhD dissertation "A Fine-grained Error Tagger for Learner Corpora" (2007).

 w University of Edinburgh LT-TTT2 Tokenizer, http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/software/lt-ttt2 using LT-TTT2, Version 1.0, released 28 July 2008, based on corpus text including xml error tags The importance of foreign languages nowadays. would like to work in a company in which English is used. would like to reach a high level in English.

Handwritten compositions by university students. The compositions have been typed up.

 JA-A-4-428-1 Nowadays if you travel to a foreign country , whatever was its official language , you could communicate with people there in English . English has become the universal language , a language used in almost all the places in the Earth . Because of that it 's too important to know it . Although English is today the most important language of the world , it 's important to know other language , which have a lot of value like Chinese , French or German . These languages are used in a big number of countries too . Not only people who go out of their country to live there need to know languages . It 's obvious that when you go to another country to stay in , knowing the language which is talked there is essencial . But although you live in your country , you should know other languages because today all countries are in communication . There are a big number of items like food , cars and a big number of materials of every kind . This mean that it 's very important to know foreign languages because we have to be every they in contact with them . The best way to learn a foreign language is living in the country in which that language is used . But it 's true that in lots of cases people ca n't go out because they have here their family , their house , their friends , their job . In other words , they have here all their life and it 's impossible to them to go to another country to stay in because that mean begin again : looking for a job , looking for a place to live ... and all that in a country when you do n't know anybody . But that people which ca n't go to another country to learn a language also can learn it in their own country . Nowadays a huge number of possibilities are offered to us to learn foreign languages . We can go to academies and even learn in our home with the computer . By these ways you can get a high level of a language in every of it 's areas : reading , listening , writing and speaking . You can read lots of books in other languages and if that makes you bored , you can read newspapers and magazines . You also can watch films and to programs to improve your listening . Writing is not a problem becase although you do n't live in the foreign country to practice the language , you can use the Internet to communicate with other people in chatrooms and by e - mail . If you are more traditional , you can also write letters . Moreover , by this way you will make friends of all the world ! Speaking is the most difficult thing to practice if you do n't stay in the country in which it is talked but there are also things that you can do although you live in your own country . You can have conversations by telephone with people in other countries although this are the most expensive option . If you buy a microphone , you could maintain conversations with people in other countries in your own bedroom . And there are only some options to learn foreign languages . With the high number of possibilities offered to us , who do n't learn a foreign language is because we does n't want it . It 's clear that the importance of knowing foreign languages is big because we will have to use them in almost all of the ambits of our life .