NLEC comprises argumentative texts written by Norwegian junior and senior high-school students. The pilot corpus currently in progress includes texts from the first year of senior high school only. As of June 2026, the corpus contains close to 300 texts.
One of the most prominent features of NLEC is that it includes detailed information on the time students spend on five different extramural English activities (i.e. self-initiated English-language activities that students engage in outside of the classroom). More specifically, the corpus includes information on how many hours per week students (i) read in English, (ii) watch TV shows or movies in English, (iii) engage in conversations in English, (iv) spend time on social media with English content, and (v) communicate in English while playing computer/video games.
NLEC is modelled on the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC), and the NLEC team will cooperate with the SLEC team on both corpus compilation and research. Another recent corpus built on the same model is the Chinese Learner English Corpus, which gives opportunities for both linguistic and cultural comparisons using NLEC, SLEC and CLEC. See also ComplEExity for a related research project using SLEC.
NLEC has received funding for a pilot project from the Text Hub, HumIT, at the University of Oslo.
Team members: Hilde Hasselgård (ILOS), Pia Sundqvist (ILS), Christine Fossen Germundson (research assistant), Sophie Llewellyn (research assistant), Aleksandra Wit (MA student).
Conference presentations:
Hasselgård, H., Kaatari, H., Llewellyn, S. & Sundqvist, P. (Accepted). Extramural English and vocabulary use: Keywords and collocations in the Norwegian Learner English Corpus. Learner Corpus Research Conference, LCR 2026.