Volume 21 Number 3, October 2017 Special Issue on Corpora in Language Learning and Teaching
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ItemCorpora in language learning and teaching(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01)
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ItemCall for papers(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-08)
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ItemAnnouncements(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-07)
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ItemUsing corpora to develop learners’ collocational competence(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01)This article investigates the role of direct corpus use in learners’ collocational competence in academic writing. An experiment was conducted between two groups of Chinese postgraduates who had no previous knowledge of corpora. It was embedded in a regular 4-month linguistics course in the students’ programmes, where a corpus-assisted method was used for the experimental group and a traditional, or rule-based, method was used for the control group. The English essays written by these two groups of learners from different time periods (before, immediately after, and two months after the course) were analysed regarding the learners’ collocational use—in particular, verb-preposition collocations. The results reveal that while both groups showed improvements in their academic writing, the students in the experimental group displayed a significant improvement in the use of collocations, including a higher rate of accuracy, or naturalness, and an increased use of academic collocations and fixed phraseological items. It is thus concluded that the knowledge and use of corpora can help students raise their awareness of habitual collocational use and develop their collocational competence. This supports the positive role of direct corpus application in an EFL context.
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ItemTraining teachers in data driven learning: Tackling the challenge(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01)The aim of this article is to assess the effectiveness of a semester-long pre-service teacher-training course on the use of corpora in language learning and teaching. This is achieved by an analysis of 53 corpus-based projects prepared by the participants. First, the aims and the design of the course are briefly presented. The main section of the article examines the trainees’ projects, which involved compiling small English for specific purposes corpora, analysing them and preparing corpus-based lessons. Specifically, the topics of the projects, the corpora that the participants built, the types of the analyses conducted, and the corpus-informed and corpus-based activities created by the trainees are examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. The projects’ outcomes reveal that the competencies developed by the pre-service teachers during the course were not sufficient. The participants seemed to have mastered only the basic technical skills of manipulating corpora, and they lacked autonomy in corpus-linguistic skills and pedagogical skills which were necessary for successful exploitations of corpora in language education. This observation—supported by earlier research—calls for the development and empirical validation of a model of effective teacher training in corpus-informed and corpus-based instruction.
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ItemReview of Language-Learner Computer Interactions: Theory, Methodology, and CALL Applications(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-06)
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ItemTeaching Google search techniques in an L2 academic writing context(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01)This mixed-method study examines the effectiveness of teaching Google search techniques (GSTs) to Korean EFL college students in an intermediate-level academic English writing course. 18 students participated in a 4-day GST workshop consisting of an overview session of the web as corpus and Google as a concordancer, and three training sessions targeting the use of quotation marks (“”) and a wildcard (*). Each session contained a pre-test, a 30-minute training, and a post-test, and each training session focused on one of the three key writing points: articles, collocations, and paraphrasing. Two questionnaires for demographic information and GST learning experiences were conducted. The results showed a statistically significant effect for the overall gain score. In particular, participants’ use of articles greatly improved after the training—in contrast to their use of collocations and paraphrasing. Lack of grammar and vocabulary knowledge seemed to hinder their data-driven learning, especially for collocation use and paraphrasing. The questionnaire data showed that all students found the GSTs beneficial, mostly because they were easy to use for confirmation and correction. Overall, both quantitative and qualitative data suggest that teachers’ meticulous guidance and vigilant individualized feedback are necessary to facilitate L2 self-directed Google-informed writing.
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ItemEnhancing extensive reading with data-driven learning(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01)This paper investigates using data-driven learning (DDL) as a means of stimulating greater lexicogrammatical knowledge and reading speed among lower proficiency learners in an extensive reading program. For 16 weekly 90-minute sessions, an experimental group (12 students) used DDL materials created from a corpus developed from the Oxford Bookworms Graded Readers, while a control group (10 students) had no DDL input. Both classes were required to read a minimum of 200,000 words during the course. An embedded-experiment design (Edmonds & Kennedy, 2017) was adopted consisting of both qualitative and quantitative forms of investigation. Quantitative data from the Vocabulary Levels Test by Nation and Beglar (2007) and a C-test (Klein-Braley & Raatz, 1984) constructed from an upper-level Bookworms reader found statistically significant lexicogrammatical improvements for both groups, but greater improvement took place within the control group. Qualitative data derived from a repertory grid analysis of student constructs revealed several possible reasons for the experimental group’s lack of engagement with DDL. The study concludes that careful attention to students’ learning preferences and a softening of the DDL approach may ensure better results with lower proficiency learners.
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ItemReview of Blended Language program Evaluation(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-04)
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ItemData-Informed language learning(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01)