ETS RR-13-24 - TOEFL11: A Corpus of Non-Native English

Sep 30, 2026

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This report presents the development of a new publicly available corpus of non-native English writing, named TOEFL11. The corpus supports native language identification and related educational NLP tasks, including grammatical error detection and correction, and automatic essay scoring. TOEFL11 is built from essays written during the high-stakes TOEFL test, with 1,100 essays per language sampled as evenly as possible across eight prompts and annotated with score levels (low, medium, high).

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages20

Reading Time50 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Key words

Motivation

Native Language Identification

Research Report ETS RR–13-24 TOEFL11: A Corpus of Non-Native English Daniel Blanchard Joel Tetreault Derrick Higgins Aoife Cahill Martin Chodorow November 2013 ETS Research Report Series EIGNOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR James Carlson Principal Psychometrician ASSOCIATE EDITORS Beata Beigman Klebanov Research Scientist Heather Buzick Research Scientist Brent Bridgeman Distinguished Presidential Appointee Keelan Evanini Managing Research Scientist Marna Golub-Smith Principal Psychometrician Shelby Haberman Distinguished Presidential Appointee Gary Ockey Research Scientist Donald Powers Managing Principal Research Scientist Gautam Puhan Senior Psychometrician John Sabatini Managing Principal Research Scientist Matthias von Davier Director, Research Rebecca Zwick Distinguished Presidential Appointee PRODUCTION EDITORS Kim Fryer Manager, Editing Services Ruth Greenwood Editor Since its 1947 founding, ETS has conducted and disseminated scientific research to support its products and services, and to advance the measurement and education fields. In keeping with these goals, ETS is committed to making its research freely available to the professional community and to the general public. Published accounts of ETS research, including papers in the ETS Research Report series, undergo a formal peer-review process by ETS staff to ensure that they meet established scientific and professional standards. All such ETS-conducted peer reviews are in addition to any reviews that outside organizations may provide as part of their own publication processes. Peer review notwithstanding, the positions expressed in the ETS Research Report series and other published accounts of ETS research are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Officers and Trustees of Educational Testing Service. The Daniel Eignor Editorship is named in honor of Dr. Daniel R. Eignor, who from 2001 until 2011 served the Research and Development division as Editor for the ETS Research Report series. The Eignor Editorship has been created to recognize the pivotal leadership role that Dr. Eignor played in the research publication process at ETS. TOEFL11: A Corpus of Non-Native English Daniel Blanchard Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey Joel Tetreault Nuance Communications, Inc., Sunnyvale, California Derrick Higgins and Aoife Cahill Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey Martin Chodorow Hunter College and the Graduate Center of CUNY, New York, New York November 2013 Find other ETS-published reports by searching the ETS ReSEARCHER database at [http://search.ets.org/researcher/](http://search.ets.org/researcher/) To obtain a copy of an ETS research report, please visit [http://www.ets.org/research/contact.html](http://www.ets.org/research/contact.html) Action Editor: Beata Beigman Klebanov Reviewer: Jill Burstein Copyright © 2013 by Educational Testing Service. All rights reserved. E-RATER, ETS, the ETS logo, and LISTENING. LEARNING. LEADING., TOEFL, and TOEFL IBT are registered trademarks of Educational Testing Service (ETS) . Abstract This report presents work on the development of a new corpus of non-native English writing. It will be useful for the task of native language identiﬁcation, as well as grammatical error detection and correction, and automatic essay scoring. In this report, the corpus is described in detail. Key words: native language identiﬁcation, corpora, TOEFL test This report presents a new publicly available corpus of non-native English writing called TOEFL11 .1 TOEFL11 consists of essays written during a high-stakes college-entrance test, the TOEFL test. The corpus contains 1,100 essays per language sampled as evenly as possible from eight prompts (i.e. , topics) along with score levels (low/medium/high) for each essay. 1 Motivation The release of the TOEFL11 corpus is intended to support a broad range of research studies in the

FAQs

What is TOEFL11, and what problem does it address?

TOEFL11 is a publicly available corpus of non-native English writing developed to support native language identification (NLI). It is also designed to be useful for other educational NLP tasks such as error detection and correction and automatic essay scoring.

How is the TOEFL11 corpus constructed?

TOEFL11 consists of essays written during the TOEFL test, with 1,100 essays per language sampled as evenly as possible from eight prompts. Each essay is associated with score levels (low, medium, high).

What kinds of research tasks does the corpus enable?

The report highlights use in NLI and in broader educational-domain tasks, including grammatical error detection and correction and automatic essay scoring. It also notes that the corpus can support tailoring feedback for developing writers.

Sep 30, 2026

Upload by lilac