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The present study aims to show theoretical values of children's corpora and learner corpus research (LCR) for second language acquisition (SLA) and other related academic fields. It first overviews how rare it has been to analyze children's writings in previous research due to the difficulty of building elementary learner corpora. Then, it presents a case study on the use of English articles as a piece of example research. The researcher created the Korean Elementary Students' Corpus (KESC) and prepared for three other corpora for a quasi-longitudinal analysis. As a result of the multiple comparative analysis, this case study drew valuable findings about Korean learners' use of English articles. First, Korean children significantly underuse both definite and indefinite articles (THE and A(AN)), compared to native speaking children. Second, Korean adult learners also significantly underuse THE compared to native speaking adults, whereas they significantly overuse A(AN). Last, Korean learners have difficulty in using articles even when they become adults, whereas native speakers appear to develop the knowledge of English articles as they grow up. The findings of the case study seem to raise more questions than answers as to the acquisition of English articles. It is believed to provide the preliminary information that could be useful for further research. They also suggest that elementary learner corpora could be used to discover other salient L2 features that L2 children produce, and to make valuable contributions to a better understanding of SLA and other academic fields in future research
