The development of the Pearson International Corpus of Academic English (PICAE) is an ongoing major initiative to construct a thirty million-word international corpus. In contrast to existing corpora, this corpus will comprise data from the five main varieties of English from the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and will respect the written as well as spoken academic English of major academic registers.
PICAE will assess whether the questions used within PTE Academic accurately represent the linguistic characteristics of spoken and written international academic English. In addition to being a validity tool for PTE Academic, PICAE will be a valuable new language resource which can serve as a source for more authentic teaching material and support the creation of learners’ material.