Annotating and Analyzing Learner Production with UAM Corpus Tool

The increasing integration of learner corpora into Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has created the need for annotation tools that support systematic, transparent, and multi-layer analyses of learner production. This article presents UAM CorpusTool (http://www.corpustool.com/) as a comprehensive environment for annotating and analyzing learner language, demonstrating its methodological potential for both SLA and Learner Corpus Research (LCR). Drawing on previous studies, we first show how the tool has been employed to investigate a wide range of linguistic domains—including morphosyntax, semantics, discourse–pragmatics, anaphora resolution, and morphological accuracy—across diverse L1–L2 combinations and proficiency levels. These studies illustrate how UAM CorpusTool enables fine-grained, theoretically informed analyses of form–function mappings and cross-linguistic influence. The core contribution of the article is a step-by-step simulation that reproduces the main stages of a corpus-based SLA study using UAM CorpusTool. The demonstration guides readers through project creation, annotation-scheme design, manual tagging of linguistic phenomena, participant metadata coding, and the use of the tool’s querying and statistical pane. The simulation illustrates how researchers can integrate qualitative annotation with quantitative analysis within a single interface. Overall, the article provides a practical methodological guide that highlights UAM CorpusTool’s flexibility and analytical power for the study of L2 production via LCR. It shows how the software supports rigorous corpus-based research in SLA, facilitates cross-corpus comparability, and bridges descriptive and statistical approaches in LCR.