CORPORA

Pedagogical uses of corpora: theories and practices

• Why corpora?
• Corpus skills
• Theory and practice
• Enhancing pedagogic corpora: SACODEYL and beyond
• perezparedes.blogspot.fr

Untitled Slide

What are some things humans are better than computers at doing?

pattern recognition

Humans are very good at recognizing patterns.

We even think we find patterns in places where no pattern really exists.

The different points of light that make up Orion or the Big Dipper bear no natural relation to one another.

Yet when we look up at the night sky, our minds begin to group stars into patterns and shapes.

It is this pattern-seeking behavior and imaginative vision that allows us to recognize people and objects.

Language is highly patterned and variation is highly systematic.

Leech (1992) CL a methodological basis for pursuing linguistic research and find patterns.

Corpora

• Why corpora? Why not dictionaries or Google?
• What does it take to use corpora?

Corpora users need:

CORPORA USERS & USES

• 1. The role of intuition
• One of the roles of intuition is to test corpus findings
• Intuition is also important in formulating queries
• Intuition can  help us decide how far we should restrict a query 

Cognitive scientists treat intuitions as quick first assessments of a given situation, as provisional hypotheses in need of further checking.

CORPORA USERS & USES

• 2. Interpretation skills
• Given the size of corpora, corpus analysis is increasingly quantitative
• Manipulating corpora and analysing complex skills which require training

CORPORA USERS & USES

• 3. The empowerment factor
• Highly motivating for learners for the sense of empowerment
• Extremely useful for the language researcher

CORPORA USERS & USES

• Initiate,interpret,consolidate,report,recycle,result, repeat
• Sinclair (2003)

Einstein and all that jazz

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, theory and practice are different.

Researching uses of corpora for language teaching and learning

Einstein and all that jazz

• Cheng, Warren and Xun-feng (2003) 
• Bernardini (2004)
• Discovery & detective skills 

Einstein and all that jazz

• In theory... 
• Discovery learning is accessible to all learners
• In practice...

% Students in EU 27 (Pérez-Paredes, 2010)

DDL studies (Boulton, 2008b)

Einstein and all that jazz

• In theory...
• It's possible to use language corpora and CL in the classroom
• In practice...
• Little attention paid to pedagogic transfer (Pérez-Paredes,2010)
• Recognizing chunking & collocates is a problem (Huang,2014)

Einstein and all that jazz

• In theory...
• It's possible to use language corpora and CL in the classroom
• In practice...
• Encountering unfamiliar vocabulary and cut-off concordance lines pose probl
•  (Geluso & Yamaguchi, 2014)

Einstein and all that jazz

• In theory...
• It's possible to use language corpora and CL in the classroom
• In practice...
• 80% of PhD learners in the study thought COCA difficult to use
• Chang (2014)

It seems that we first have to persuade our colleagues working in language and linguistics departments and on teacher-training programmes to use corpora in their teaching before we can expect that the word will spread further.

however,

The use of corpus examples for language comprehension and production.
Ana Frankerberg-García.

Positive effect on language production: supplying learners with multiple corpus examples

The effects of using corpora on revision tasks in L2 writing with coded error feedback. Tono, Satake & Miura. Omission/addition errors of prepositions.

The guided error feedback with a special focus on errors with choice of lexical items and the availability of corpus evidence for reference seemed to help the learners revise their drafts appropriately, especially in Group A who had a higher level of proficiency and produced longer essays than Group B.

The effects of paper-based DDL on the acquisition of lexico-grammatical patterns in L2 writing. Huang.

DDL can be an effective approach to helping learners obtain and retain lexico-grammatical patterns.

The role of guided induction in paper-based data-driven learning. Smart.

The DDL group significantly improved their grammar ability with the passive voice, while the other two treatment groups did not show significant gains.

Enhancing writing pedagogy with learner corpus data. Cotos.

The results showed an increase in frequency, diversity and accuracy in all participants’ use of adverbials, but more significant improvement was made by the students who were exposed to the corpus containing their own writing.

Discovering formulaic language through data-driven learning: Student attitudes and efficacy. Geluso & Yamaguchi.

The students believe DDL to be a useful and effective tool in the classroom.

The use of general and specialized corpora as reference sources for academic English writing: A case study. Chang.

The participants highly valued the specialized corpus for its direct relevance to their academic fields.

Is this enough? A qualitative evaluation of the effectiveness of a teacher-training course on the use of corpora in language education. Leńko-Szymańska.

The students reacted positively to the course and they saw the benefits of corpus-based materials and tools in language teaching.

Enhancing and extending corpora

STUDENTS

STUDENTS

linguists

STUDENTS

LINGUISTS

From the perspective of language teaching and learning, one direction which seems important is that of multimedia corpora of speech, where audio (and even video) are aligned with their transcriptions, so that as well as reading a concordance line, the user can immediately hear the corresponding audio segment.

sacodeyl & backbone

sacodeyl & backbone

• Outdated resources: www & mobile friendly 
• TEI
• Failed to attract the attention of teachers

sacodeyl & backbone

• WWW service 
• Online access, sharing, interaction, no plug-ins, no desktop 
• Mobile integration
• Take advantage of new technologies: automatic transcription

sacodeyl & backbone

• Adaptative corpora 
• Integration of other search cultures
• Disintegration of prof. language analysis tools 

Supposing is good

@perezparedes
perezparedes.blogspot.fr
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