I am a permanent FNRS research associate at UCLouvain, Belgium, co-director of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, and a member of the Institute for Language and Communication and the Language and Literature School. I coordinate the CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Learner Corpora. I am also an affiliate member of the Corpus Linguistics Lab, University of Florida.
I hold a PhD in Linguistics (Université catholique de Louvain) and a degree in Natural Language Processing (Université de Liège).
I specialize in the use of learner corpora to study key topics in Second Language Acquisition (crosslinguistic influence, complexity, formulaic language/phraseology) and I am particularly interested in methodological issues (from corpus design to corpus analysis).
I am founding editor (with Marcus Callies, Bremen University) and co-editor (with Sandra Götz, Philipps University Marburg) of the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research. I co-edited two handbooks that represent my research interests well:
- Paquot, M. & Gries, S. Th. (eds). (2020). A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Springer.
- Tracy-Ventura, N. & Paquot, M. (eds). (2021). The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Corpora. Routledge.
I am also a founding member (with my colleagues Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Sylviane Granger and Fanny Meunier) of the Learner Corpus Research Association.
Since 2008, I have been the coordinator of the international project ‘Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA)’, which aims to compile and analyze a learner corpus of academic writing representing a wide range of disciplines and text types, and was appointed a member of the IRIS Advisory Group in 2016.