Data collected in learner corpora in principle can help validate generalizations about language acquisition and provide a broad empirical basis for the development of new hypotheses and theories.

In this talk, we argue for a) the creation of learner corpora stemming from a variety of contexts and tasks, b) the linguistic annotation of learner corpora to support effective querying for example patterns discussed in SLA research, and c) the importance of high annotation quality and how it can be achieved.

We identify a clear need for more interdisciplinary collaboration between applied and computational linguistics to develop adequate annotation schemes for learner language gold standard corpora and automatic annotation methods for such interlanguage.