Online Language Education: Principles of Creating a Marked Corpus of Learners’ Mistakes

Today, academic corpora are a matter of great interest to many linguists. The article examines the importance of academic corpora in modern linguistics and pedagogy as a tool for identifying typical errors in the speech of foreign language students. They reveal problems in foreign language acquisition and create new teaching methods. The paper reviews the existing academic corpora and error classifications. The authors developed a corpus of oral speech errors typical of Russian-speaking IT students that study English for IT purposes. The corpus relied on 50 video recordings of in-class activities in which students communicated with English-speaking IT specialists and made up dialogues in English. The corpus made it possible to identify the main difficulties experienced by adult learners of English for IT purposes. It involves a tagged classification of typical errors divided by language level into morphological, syntactic, lexical, and phonetic ones. The research demonstrated good prospects for developing other academic speech corpora with automated error tagging based on the speech of English learners.