This article gives a general presentation of the methodology and the selection criteria used to establish the French Learner Oral Corpus project that I developed between 2002 and 2004, while a lecturer at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona.* This research project stems from my interest in understanding the acquisition of oral competence among students of French at this institution, and my dissatisfaction with a lack of objective data to characterize precisely the linguistic features of their oral inter language.