The English Teacher Corpus: a novel approach to learner corpus development

This study introduces the English Teacher Corpus (etc), delineating its development, technical parameters, and research prospects. This spoken learner corpus contains spontaneous and semi-spontaneous speech tasks performed by Czech teachers of English as a foreign language (efl). The tasks include a monologue, dialogue, picture-based narrative, reading-aloud assignment, and an interview conducted in the teacher’s L1. Complementing this corpus is a reference counterpart featuring native English teachers based in the Czech Republic, mirroring the etc’s task design. In its 12.5 hours of recorded and transcribed text, the etc consists of 76,122 tokens for the L2 and 31,898 tokens for the L1 sub-corpus. The corpus has been partly transcribed by Whisper AI and subsequently aligned using exmaralda. The etc marks a pioneering effort as the first spoken learner corpus produced by efl teachers. Its innovation extends beyond its content, as it gave rise to a developmental and pedagogical project within a university teacher-training programme.