The area of linguistic inquiry known as learner corpus research, which has only existed since the late 1980s, has created an important link between the two previously disparate fields of corpus linguistics and foreign/second lan-guage research.Using the main principles, tools and methods from corpus linguistics, it aims to provide improved descrip-tions of learner language which can be used for a wide range of purposes in foreign/second language acquisition re-search and also to improve foreign language teaching.