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Register variation is a crucial aspect of language production. Corpus-based explorations of language have yielded valuable insights into linguistic patterns associated with different registers (Biber et al., 2021). While register has important implications for any type of language production, it is particularly relevant to explore in learner language, because L2 learners as novice users of the target language may not show the same register awareness as native or expert writers/speakers (Gilquin & Paquot, 2008). However, studies comparing learner language registers are still relatively rare, with a small but growing body of work, including Fuchs et al. (2016), Larsson et al. (2021) and Pyykönen (2023). When different registers have been compared, the analysis has mainly been based on texts produced by different groups of learners (e.g. argumentative essays produced by one group of learners and interviews produced by another group). However, collecting texts written by the same learners across registers offers the opportunity to investigate how they adapt their language use to different communicative situations (e.g. Biber & Egbert, 2023; Kerz et al., 2022; Spina, 2025). Although a small number of projects have begun to address this issue (with CROW, Staples & Dilger, 2018, as a notable example), such resources remain rare, and open-access datasets of this kind are still particularly limited. This paper sets out to describe the compilation of the STudent speech and writing Across Registers (STAR) corpus, a new corpus of student language productions that brings together texts from multiple registers produced by the same L2 English or L1 English students. The L2 English component of the STAR corpus contains data collected at UCLouvain from French-speaking learners of English who are students in their second year of English major studies. The L1 English component comprises data collected from first-year students enrolled in a variety of degree programmes at Northern Arizona University. The paper details the written and spoken registers included in the L1 and L2 English components of the corpus (e.g. career readiness essays, diary entries, a debate and an informal conversation between two students) as well as the steps that were taken to ensure comparability across the datasets (e.g. identical or very similar writing prompts, topic control). It also reports on the pedagogical tasks used to elicit language production across registers as well as on the rich metadata that were collected about the L1 and L2 students (e.g. L1s and any possible additional languages, exposure to English in different situations, degree of literacy), relying on Paquot et al.’s (2024) Core Metadata Schema for Learner Corpora. Once completed, the STAR corpus will be released in open access format and will make it possible for researchers to compare student language productions across registers while controlling for individual variables and styles, and to investigate the effect of register on the linguistic features of novice writers and speakers of English. The paper is rounded off with a presentation of concrete examples of research projects that can be conducted thanks to the new corpus.
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De Cock, S., Egbert, J., Gilquin, G., Granger, S., Grixoni, F., Holmberg, A. J., Jadoulle, P., Larsson, T., & Paquot, M. (2026, September). The STAR corpus: A constellation of student written and spoken registers. Learner Corpus Research conference, Prague. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/281348