The Core Metadata Schema for Learner Corpora (LC-meta)

Abstract Metadata is critical throughout the research process, from study design to corpus selection/compilation, result interpretability and cumulative research. To date, however, learner corpus research has not developed community standards or best practices for metadata collection and sharing. In this article, we present the results of a collaborative project aimed at addressing this issue by developing a standardised metadata schema for learner corpora. We first describe the procedure implemented to design the schema, including the ways in which we continuously involved learner corpus researchers in this initiative. We then introduce the Core Metadata Schema for Learner Corpora (LC-meta, Version 2), which consists in a set of obligatory and optional variables that encapsulate crucial information about L2 data (administrative details, corpus design, text-related variables, learner-related variables, annotations, annotators, or transcribers). Finally, we discuss future developments and emphasise the importance of continued maintenance and further refinement of this schema by the research community.