Corpus Linguistics & Language Pedagogy

Argumentation across L1 and L2 Writing: Exploring Cultural Influences and Transfer issues

by Hacer Hande Uysal

Published in Vial Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics (2012)

Book Review: Corpora, Language, Teaching, and Resources: From Theory to Practice

by Duygu Candarli

“This review appeared originally in the LINGUIST List at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-1926.html.”

Nigerian Letters, Dutch Lottery and Teaching an ESP Genre

by Ismael Arinas Pellón

Co-authored with María Jesús Gozalo Sáinz, Trinidad González González, available in Lenguas para fines específicos . (VIII) Investigación y enseñanza / coord. por Lina Sierra, Esther Hernández, 2005, ISBN 84-8138-632-4 , págs. 89-96

Building a corpus of scam letters has several advantages when teaching business correspondence to Spanish Engineering... more Building a corpus of scam letters has several advantages when teaching business correspondence to Spanish Engineering students: these letters can introduce some humour into a technical English class; they are general enough to be relevant for a varied range of specialties; they follow very closely the genre pattern suggested by Bhatia (1993); they are easy to collect, even “unsolicited” or “unsought”; they provide abundant material for didactic research and exercise creation; and they are easy to analyse using software. The combination of traditional and corpus software analysis has allowed us to develop some useful strategies for teaching the genre of sales promotion letters and the development of specific exercises that take into account the needs of students with different levels and learning strategies.

Text Corpora in Translator Training. A Case Study of the Use of Comparable Corpora in Classroom Teaching

by Ismael Arinas Pellón

Co-authored with Anne Lise Laurse; published in The Interpreter and Translator Trainer (ITT): Volume 6, Number 1: 45-70

Specialized translation programmes are traditionally expected to transform trainees into linguistic experts in terms... more Specialized translation programmes are traditionally expected to transform trainees into linguistic experts in terms of specialized languages and semi-experts in terms of specialized domains such as economics, technology and law. This type of education aims to teach trainees how to manage a host of encyclopaedic and linguistic data adequately for professional translation purposes within a relatively short period of time. A practical approach to this challenge requires teaching specific processes that can be applied systematically to new contexts. This paper demonstrates how comparable text corpora and concordance software can be used as an efficient and versatile tool for classroom training within the syllabus of specialized translation between Spanish and Danish. In concurrent classroom sessions consisting of software introduction and translation training, trainees acquire the relevant basic software skills related to the concordance program as well as the ability to analyze a set of comparable corpora within a specific genre, in this case the genre of annual reports. The analysis they undertake teaches them how to identify differences in stylistic features between Spanish and Danish, and how to base their own translation choices on corpus data.

General spoken language and school language. Key words and discourse patterns in history textbooks

by Paola Leone

published in M. Bondi & M. Scott Keyness in text, John Benjamins Publishing Co: Amsterdam-Philadelphia, 2010, pp. 235-248

The current study uses keyness to identify the essential lexicon and lexical patterns of history textbooks and match... more The current study uses keyness to identify the essential lexicon and lexical patterns of history textbooks and match them to the out-of-school input to which a young learner might be exposed. Two frequency-ordered lists have been compared using the KeyWords component of WordSmith Tools v. 5.0 (Scott 2008). The first, compiled from a corpus of history textbooks used in lower secondary schools in Italy, named CoMaS (Corpus di Manuali di Storia), ascertains words needed to study history at school. The other, compiled from a published corpus of Italian spoken language, called LIP (Lessico di Frequenza dell’Italiano Parlato), specifies words frequent in daily communication. Results show discoursal,
lexical, semantic, and morphological features which may be unfamiliar to the learner, and which should therefore be considered in a syllabus designed to develop students’ ability to interpret and express historical discourse.

De l’enseignement des variétés avec corpus à la formation à la variation sur corpus : des outils pour le français parlé

by Sylvain Detey

Detey, S., Durand, J., Laks, B. & Lyche, C. (2011), « De l’enseignement des variétés avec corpus à la formation à la variation sur corpus : des outils pour le français parlé ». In Bertrand, O. & Schaffner, I. (éds). Variétés, variations et formes du français. Palaiseau : Editions de l’Ecole Polytechnique, 407-427.

Qu’il s’agisse d’enseigner le français langue première (FL1), seconde (FLS) ou étrangère (FLE), voire la linguistique... more Qu’il s’agisse d’enseigner le français langue première (FL1), seconde (FLS) ou étrangère (FLE), voire la linguistique française elle-même, la manipulation adéquate de formes linguistiques dites « authentiques » suppose, chez l’enseignant, une formation à la gestion de la variation linguistique. La question se pose de manière particulièrement aiguë lorsque le matériau langagier est issu de corpus oraux, présentant alors, par définition, un haut degré de variabilité. Quels sont donc aujourd’hui les outils de formation et les ressources, linguistiques et didactiques, disponibles pour former à l’étude et à l’enseignement de la variation ?

Dans ce chapitre, nous présentons des outils de formation élaborés sur la base du corpus de référence PFC (Durand, Laks et Lyche 2009), variation non seulement géographique (diatopique) (Detey, Durand, Laks et Lyche 2010b), mais aussi inter- et intra-locuteurs (d’un point de vue diaphasique et diastratique) (Detey, Durand, Laks et Lyche en préparation). Nous abordons ces domaines de variation à l’aide d’exemples variés : propositions relatives non-standard en France métropolitaine (Rossi-Gensane 2010), particularités morphologiques au Canada (Walker 2010), variation générationnelle dans la réalisation du /R/ en Pays Basque (Tarrier 2010), variation diaphasique dans la réalisation des liaisons (Durand et Lyche 2008). De tels phénomènes, pour pouvoir être appréhendés et compris, nécessitent des outils descriptifs et informatiques dédiés, généralement absents des approches traditionnelles (grammaires prescriptives, traités théoriques, etc.). Ce sont certains de ces outils, indispensables à la formation des enseignants, que nous avons développés et que nous nous proposons d’illustrer.

English in the context of European integration: A corpus-driven analysis of lexical bundles in English EU documents

by Reka Jablonkai

English for Specific Purposes 29(4), 253-267. (2010)

This study extends research into the use of English as a lingua franca in the European context by investigating the... more This study extends research into the use of English as a lingua franca in the European context by investigating the most frequent word combinations in English documents issued by EU institutions. As there is little research on the use of the English language within the European Union for ESP pedagogic purposes, as part of a larger scale analysis, the aim of this study is to explore the structures and functions of lexical bundles in English EU texts, and to draw conclusions regarding their relevance for language courses on English for EU purposes. Findings suggest that the structural and functional classification of EU lexical bundles show similarities with the language of university textbooks and academic prose in general. However, written English EU discourse applies lexical bundles in higher frequencies, which suggests that a fairly large proportion of EU texts are made up of formulaic patterns. The pedagogical implications of this study highlight the importance of explicit instruction in this type of word combination in courses on English for EU purposes.


Please email me for an electronic copy of the paper. reka.jablonkai@gmail.com

"IN THE LIGHT OF": A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF LEXICAL BUNDLES IN TWO EU-RELATED REGISTERS

by Reka Jablonkai

Working Papers in Language Pedagogy 1-27. (2009)

This paper is a report on a corpus-based analysis of two EU-related registers. The study aims to explore the discourse... more This paper is a report on a corpus-based analysis of two EU-related registers. The study aims to explore the discourse of official EU texts and online EU news applying a frequency-based approach suggested by Biber and Conrad (1999). The concept developed and applied for this approach is the lexical bundle which has been found characteristic for specific registers. Based on the investigation of the most frequent 50 single-word items and the structural and functional analysis of the identified lexical bundles in official EU texts and online EU news texts, the discourse of the two EU-related registers are found to differ considerably. Discourse in official EU texts can be characterised in contrast to online EU news texts by a higher proportion of content words in the top 50 single-word lexical items, more frequent use of lexical bundles in general, very few identical lexical bundles and by a significantly different distribution of lexical bundles across structural types and functional categories. Besides the description of the two EU-related registers, pedagogical implications are also discussed.

From a specialised corpus to classrooms for specific purposes

by Reka Jablonkai

Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics 2009. 21-23 July, 2009, University of Liverpool.

This paper reports a corpus-based analysis of the most frequent lexical items in English EU discourse. An EU word list... more This paper reports a corpus-based analysis of the most frequent lexical items in English EU discourse. An EU word list was developed on the basis of the English EU Discourse Corpus containing slightly more than 1 million running words of official EU texts of 40 different genres that was created on the basis of the findings of a needs analysis questionnaire among EU professionals. The established EUWL comprises 513 word families, which account for 18.03% of the tokens in the EEUD Corpus. The evaluation of the EUWL found that established word list is EU-specific and it has a high text coverage in EU texts. The results of the analysis established that the EUWL can serve as a firm basis for course and materials design for English for the EU language programmes.

Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching

by Marco Venuti

Published in A Corrado e G Di Martino (ed) 2003 Parlare è comunicare?, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 257-264

British Media and the Euro. L'uso dell'e-mail nell'insegnamento della lingua inglese per gli studenti della facoltà di scienze politiche

by Marco Venuti

Co-authored with Francesca Vaghi

Published in "Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata", 2004, pp. 305-324

Discovering Patterns and Discourse Strategies: CADS in an ESP Course for International Relations Students

by Marco Venuti

Co-authored with Giulia Riccio

Published in L Lombardo (ed.) Using Corpora to Learn about Language and Discourse, Bern: Peter Lang, 133-162

Transcription de corpus d'apprenants multilingues de FLE et analyse interphonologique: enjeux méthodologiques

by Sylvain Detey

Learner Autonomy through the Use of a Concordancer

by Jon Mills

The pedagogic value of electronic text analysis and retrieval systems in the fields of literary studies and language... more The pedagogic value of electronic text analysis and retrieval systems in the fields of literary studies and language teaching is becoming more and more common with the availability of good easy-to-use software and sources of machine readable text. Once students are familiar with this tool, they may use it as readily as a dictionary to find examples of usage from their chosen corpus of text. Students' use of a concordancer involves more than looking up facts, a single consultation has a tendency to raise other questions, requiring further concordances. This leads to a kind of conjectural learning. Electronic text analysis offers the student the opportunity to take control of his/her own learning by means of purposeful interaction with text. The higher level skills of inferencing, connecting, interpreting and evaluating are brought into play and informal acquisition is facilitated in addition to selective
attention to linguistic or literary features.

Variation in first and second language French: the case of 'parce que'

by Henry Tyne

Corpus oraux par et pour l'apprenant

by Henry Tyne

Swimming in Words: Corpora, Translation and Language Learning

by Federico Zanettin

In Learning with Corpora, edited by Guy Aston, Houston, TX: Athelstan, 2001, 177-197.

Bilingual Comparable Corpora and the Training of Translators

by Federico Zanettin

Epistemic modality in MA dissertations

by Costas Gabrielatos

Gabrielatos, C. & McEnery, T.
2005
In P.A. Fuertes Olivera (Ed.), Lengua y Sociedad: Investigaciones recientes en lingüística aplicada. Lingüística y Filología no. 61 (pp. 311-331). Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid.

This paper reports on the compilation, and ongoing mark up and annotation, of a corpus of MA dissertations written by... more This paper reports on the compilation, and ongoing mark up and annotation, of a corpus of MA dissertations written by students at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. The main focus of the paper is a preliminary investigation comparing the use of epistemic modality by native and advanced non-native speakers of English (henceforth NS and NNS respectively) in the corpus. The paper also outlines other possible uses of the corpus for research on academic English, made possible by the information encoded in the annotation and mark up.

Corpora and language teaching: Just a fling, or wedding bells?

by Costas Gabrielatos

Gabrielatos, C.
2005
TESL-EJ, 8(4), 1-35.

Electronic language corpora, and their attendant computer software, are proving increasingly influential in language... more Electronic language corpora, and their attendant computer software, are proving increasingly influential in language teaching as sources of language descriptions and pedagogical materials. However, few teachers are clear about their nature or their relevance to language teaching. This paper defines corpora and their types, discusses their contribution to language learning and teaching, and provides examples of their use in class. It also outlines the changes in knowledge, skills and attitudes that are needed for learners and teachers to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the availability of corpus resources. Finally, the paper discusses the limitations of using corpora in language teaching, and the potential pitfalls arising from their uncritical use. Although the paper refers to research and teaching materials and procedures relevant to English language teaching (ELT) it addresses issues related to language teaching in general.