May 6-7, 2027 – Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy
Modern societies are increasingly characterised by multilingual realities. Migration and transnational exchange have led to highly heterogeneous, “superdiverse” societies (Blommaert & Rampton 2011; Vertovec 2007), in which individuals routinely draw on multiple linguistic resources from their repertoires, including national, regional, minority, heritage and other acquired languages.
In recent years, disciplines concerned with language learning—such as Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Third Language Acquisition (TLA) and multilingual acquisition research—have increasingly recognised that learners of additional languages are often plurilingual individuals embedded in multilingual contexts (e.g. Riehl & Schroeder 2025; Sánchez 2020; De Angelis 2007; Puig-Mayecano, Gonzáles & Rothman 2018). This shift has also been reflected in learner corpus research (LCR). A growing body of work (e.g. Wulff 2017, 2023; Gilquin 2022; Frey 2025; Lopopolo et al. 2025) highlights the importance of taking learners’ multilingual backgrounds into account in both the design and analysis of learner corpora.
While most learner corpora are organised around a single target language, multilingual approaches are gaining ground. These include corpora that cover multiple target languages to enable cross-linguistic comparison (e.g. SWIKO, Hicks & Studer 2024; MLC, Tagnin 2006), as well as more rare but particularly valuable corpora that contain productions in multiple languages by the same learners (e.g. LEONIDE, Glaznieks et al. 2022; TRAWL, Dirdal et al. 2022). At the same time, there is still no consensus on what exactly constitutes a “multilingual learner corpus”, and research questions and methodological approaches vary widely (e.g. Hasselgård & Oksefjell Ebeling 2018; Dirdal & Vold 2025; Ferraresi & Bernardini 2023).
This workshop aims to bring together researchers working at the intersection of multilingualism and learner corpus research, and to foster discussion on theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues in this emerging field.