The British Academy has awarded Lancaster University a three-year grant under its International Partnership and Mobility Scheme (IPM 2013). The research partner in the joint project is Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS) in China. The project is entitled “The corpus-based approach to the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language”, which aims to develop a one-million-word balanced corpus of spoken and written Chinese interlanguage, and on the basis of this corpus, to explore various theoretical and practical issues pertaining to the acquisition of Chinese as a foreign language. The research team includes six staff members from the Linguistics department and the Confucius Institute at Lancaster, as well as six staff members from the Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (the only national key research centre of its kind approved by the Ministry of Education) and the Institute for International Education at GDUFS. For more information, please contact Dr Richard Xiao (r.xiao@lancaster.ac.uk), the PI of the project.