Learner corpora

Russian Learner Parallel Corpus as a Tool for Translation Studies

by Andrey Kutuzov

co-authored with Kunilovskaya M.A., Oschepkov A.Y., Chepurkova A.Y., Tyumen State University, Tyumen, Russia
a talk on this will be delivered during Dialogue-2012 conference (http://dialog-21.ru)

The present paper is about the project of Russian Learner Parallel Corpus, which is currently under development. The... more The present paper is about the project of Russian Learner Parallel Corpus, which is currently under development. The paper discusses the feasibility of such a corpus and existing analogues, describes the current status of corpus building and the tasks which could be accomplished with it. Today several parallel corpora are available for a researcher, but they are supposed to contain (comparatively) “correct” translations. The aim of the project is to create a large enough corpus of imperfectly translated Russian and English texts together with their sources and use it as a tool for translation studies, especially for research related to translation mistakes. It is also valuable for computational linguistics as it provides another way of getting data for evaluation and improving of machine translation systems. As of now, the corpus is available on-line, already contains nearly half a million word tokens and growing. The main source of raw material is translations from student translators in Russian universities.

"Drugs, traffic, and many other dirty interests”: Metaphor and the Language Learner

by Gill Philip

Philip, G. 2010 ' “Drugs, traffic, and many other dirty interests”: Metaphor and the Language Learner.’ In G. Low, L. Cameron, A. Deignan & Z. Todd (eds) Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World, 63-79. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ISBN 978-90-272-2380-7

Adverb use in EFL student writing: from learner dictionary to text production

by Gill Philip

Philip, G. 2008 ‘Adverb use in EFL student writing: from learner dictionary to text production’. In E. Bernal & J. De Cesaris (edsi) Proceedings of the XIII Euralex International congress, 1301-1310. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Istitut universitari de lingüística aplicada. ISBN 978-8-49674-267-3

‘From Concept to Wording and Back Again: Features of learners’ production of figurative language

by Gill Philip

Philip, G. 2005 ‘From Concept to Wording and Back Again: Features of learners’ production of figurative language’ in J. Barnden, S. Glasbey, M. Lee, A. Wallington & L. Zhang (eds) Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Corpus-Based Approaches to Figurative Language - held in
conjunction with Corpus Linguistics 2005, 46-53. Birmingham: University Press, Birmingham. ISSN 1368-9223

Integrating language learning and teaching with the construction of computer learner corpora

by Duane Kindt

Verbos modais na escrita de universitários de língua inglesa: Uma perspectiva de corpus

by Vander Viana

The PDF file contains an uncorrected proof of the chapter:
Viana, V. (2009). Verbos modais na escrita de universitários de língua inglesa: Uma perspectiva de corpus. In S. Zyngier, V. Viana & J. Jandre (Eds.), Linguagem, criatividade e ensino: Abordagens empíricas e interdisciplinares (pp. 49-77). Rio de Janeiro: Publit.

Although modals have been central to language analysis, very few studies have focused on the written production of... more Although modals have been central to language analysis, very few studies have focused on the written production of Brazilian advanced EFL students by means of corpus analysis. The present study contrasts the use of modal verbs in the writing of Brazilian EFL undergraduates and that of American and British university students whose first language is English. As far as the data is concerned, two corpora are probed with the help of a computer tool. The research corpus consists of a sample of the Brazilian Portuguese Sub-corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (Br-ICLE), while the reference corpus corresponds to a section of the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Following a statistical approach to data treatment, the study focuses on the frequency of central modal verbs (BIBER et al., 1999), namely, ‘can’, ‘could’, ‘may’, ‘might’, ‘must’, ‘shall’, ‘should’, ‘will’ and ‘would’. The results indicate that Brazilian EFL undergraduates use significantly fewer modal verbs than their American and British counterparts. It is then argued that this reduced frequency of modals in Brazilian writing may make it sound more direct and assertive when compared to that of speakers of English as a first language. From a general perspective, the present study may contribute to a reassessment of English teaching in the Brazilian setting.

Article Errors in the English Writing of Advanced L1 Arabic Learners: The Role of Transfer

by Peter Crompton

Using a learner corpus to inform academic writing instruction

by Peter Crompton