Volume 21 Number 3, October 2017 Special Issue on Corpora in Language Learning and Teaching
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/54261
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item type: Item , Corpora in language learning and teaching(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01) Vyatkina, Nina; Boulton, AlexItem type: Item , Call for papers(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-08) LLT StaffItem type: Item , Announcements(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-07) LLT StaffItem type: Item , Using corpora to develop learners’ collocational competence(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01) Li, ShuanglingThis 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.Item type: Item , Training teachers in data driven learning: Tackling the challenge(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01) Leńko-Szymańska, AgnieszkaThe 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.Item type: Item , Review of Language-Learner Computer Interactions: Theory, Methodology, and CALL Applications(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-06) Lee, JooyoungItem type: Item , Teaching Google search techniques in an L2 academic writing context(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01) Han, Sumi; Shin, Jeong-AhThis 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.Item type: Item , Enhancing extensive reading with data-driven learning(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01) Hadley, Gregory; Charles, MaggieThis 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.Item type: Item , Review of Blended Language program Evaluation(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-04) Goertler, SentaItem type: Item , Data-Informed language learning(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01) Godwin-Jones, Robert; Godwin-Jones, RobertItem type: Item , Effects of DDL technology on genre learning(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01) Cotos, Elena; Link, Stephanie; Huffman, SarahTo better understand the promising effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on language learning processes and outcomes, this study explored DDL learning events enabled by the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), a web-based platform containing an English language corpus annotated to enhance rhetorical input, a concordancer that was searchable for rhetorical functions, and an automated writing evaluation engine that generated rhetorical feedback. Guided by current approaches to teaching academic writing (Lea & Street, 1998; Lillis, 2001; Swales, 2004) and the knowledge-telling/knowledge-transformation model of Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987), we set out to examine whether and how direct corpus uses afforded by RWT impact novice native and non-native writers’ genre learning and writing improvement. In an embedded mixed-methods design, written responses to DDL tasks and writing progress from first to last drafts were recorded from 23 graduate students in separate one-semester courses at a US university. The qualitative and quantitative data sets were used for within-student, within-group, and between-group comparisons—the two independent variables for the latter being course section and language background. Our findings suggest that exploiting technology-mediated corpora can foster novice writers’ exploration and application of genre conventions, enhancing development of rhetorical, formal, and procedural aspects of genre knowledge.Item type: Item , Technology-enhanced language learning for specialized domains: Practical applications and mobility(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-05) Becker, Kimberly; Nguyen, PhuongItem type: Item , The effect of corpus-based instruction on pragmatic routines(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01) Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen; Mossman, Sabrina; Su, YunwenThis study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A contrastive interlanguage analysis approach (Granger, 2002) was adopted to compare the phraseology of key items in the learner corpus with that found in the reference corpus. Comparison is also made with a learner corpus of reports produced by a previous cohort of students who had not used the reference corpus. Students who had done DDL tasks used a wider range of genre-appropriate phraseology and produced a lower number of stock phrases than those who had not. The study also finds evidence that students use more phrases encountered in paper-based concordancing tasks than in hands-on tasks. Unlike in previous DDL studies, observations of the learning of a specific text-type through DDL in the present study are based on the comparison with both a control learner corpus and an expert corpus. The study also considers the use of DDL with a large class size.Item type: Item , Task-based language teaching online: A guide for teachers(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-02) Baralt, Melissa; Morcillo Gómez, José; Kessler, GregTechnology-mediated task-based language teaching is the merger between technology and task-based language teaching (TBLT; González-Lloret & Ortega, 2014) and is arguably now an imperative for language education. As language classrooms are being redefined, training for how to set learners up to successfully do tasks online must be part of teachers’ professional development. However, while multiple resources have been written on tasks, technology, and task-based language courses online (e.g., Chapelle, 2014; Doughty & Long, 2003; González-Lloret, 2016; Nielson, González-Lloret, & Pinckney, 2009; Thomas & Reinders, 2012), teacher training for this purpose has largely been ignored. To date, no methodological guide for how to do TBLT via online video interactive tutorials has been published for teachers. In this article, we address this need by proposing a methodology framework for doing TBLT online. We begin with a brief review of TBLT fundamentals and demonstrate how to adapt the Willis (1996, 2012) task-based methodology framework for synchronous, online video-based interaction. We describe the framework and show examples of how to apply it while fostering socialization and community building (Hampel & Stickler, 2005). We also discuss unique challenges that teachers face when doing TBLT online, and propose solutions for how these can be overcome to maximize language learning.Item type: Item , Making it personal: Performance-based assessments, Ubiquitous technology, and advanced learners(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-03) Arispe, Kelly; Burston, Jack; Kessler, GregThis pedagogical implementation study advocates for performance-driven assessments to help learners become aware of and improve upon presentational speaking skills at the advanced level. A social media content creation tool, Adobe Spark Video, enabled learners to practice oral skills outside of class. The task design, implementation, and evaluation met the principle objectives of learner autonomy—namely awareness, choice, reflection, and goal setting. A step-by-step guide with examples and survey results about student perceptions is included. While the case study targeted upper-division Spanish majors, the pedagogical model could be adapted for intermediate and advanced learners of any second or foreign language.Item type: Item , Effects of corpus-based instruction on phraseology in learner English(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2017-10-01) Ackerley, KatherineThis study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A contrastive interlanguage analysis approach (Granger, 2002) was adopted to compare the phraseology of key items in the learner corpus with that found in the reference corpus. Comparison is also made with a learner corpus of reports produced by a previous cohort of students who had not used the reference corpus. Students who had done DDL tasks used a wider range of genre-appropriate phraseology and produced a lower number of stock phrases than those who had not. The study also finds evidence that students use more phrases encountered in paper-based concordancing tasks than in hands-on tasks. Unlike in previous DDL studies, observations of the learning of a specific text-type through DDL in the present study are based on the comparison with both a control learner corpus and an expert corpus. The study also considers the use of DDL with a large class size.