Global FD LOOK Program Trip Report

Alexandra Terashima Project Assistant Professor, ALESS Program, CGCS

Name of conference: 10th International Corpus Linguistics ConferenceJuly 21-26, 2019 Cardiff University, Wales, UK

Summary of my experience and how I plan to apply what I’ve learned to teaching:

The 10th International Corpus Linguistics Conference was hosted by the Centre for Language and Communication Research (CLCR) at Cardiff University and the theme of the conference was “The future of Corpus Linguistics”.  The scope of the conference was quite broad, but the majority of the talks were focused on research and development of tools. I had three goals in mind when I decided to attend this conference: 1. To present my research on the ALESS corpus and get advice and feedback from experienced researchers in this field about how to proceed further; 2. To learn about the tools CL researchers use to analyze learner language and what additional reference corpora might be available for either learner language and/or scientific writing; and 3. To learn more about how data-driven learning (DDL) is used in language instruction classrooms, in terms of what tools and approaches seem to be most effective and accessible for students. Therefore, I focused on attending talks and workshops that were in line with these goals.

Before the conference started, I attended a workshop entitled From linguistic description to language learning: unlocking the value of the learner language in the Cambridge Learner Corpus given byNiall Curry (Cambridge University Press) and Pascual Perez-Paredes (University of Cambridge). This workshop focused on both learner language and ways to apply corpus tools in the classroom; therefore I found it very interesting and informative. We were guided thorough a series of exercises using the SketchEngine to examine the Cambridge Learner Corpus, which is a collection of student writing from English language proficiency exams. This corpus contains a lot of information about the learners (such as their first language) and the errors are annotated and are therefore searchable. Niall and Pascual also demonstrated how the corpus could be used to design classroom tasks targeted to specific learners. I thought that this corpus could be useful as a comparison with our students’ work and Sketch Engine seems like a good option for introducing students to corpus tools, so that they can learn from looking at the language directly. However, the limitation is that this software requires a paid subscription.

Shusaku Nakayama from (Meiji Gakuen University), in his talk entitled Do EFL Textbooks Cause Unhelpful Priming on Japanese English Learner’s Use of Stative Verbs? Compared use of English by Japanese learners to the example sentences presented in English textbooks in Japan and found that as learners advance, their use of various sentence patterns (specifically use of stative verbs) narrows and follows closely the examples used in textbooks and suggested that the textbooks in Japan unhelpfully overemphasize certain patterns over others and therefore learners need to be exposed to a greater variety of verb usages.

Meilin Chen and John Flowerdew (University of London) gave a talk entitled Is one workshop enough? And investigation into students’ long-term use of corpora in writing after attending a corpus-assisted academic writing workshop. According to their abstract “DDL encourages students to be language detectives themselves to discover language features that are usually not visible to the naked eye.” In their study, the authors wanted to

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know whether 1-day workshops that teach students how to use corpus tools in their writing are led to continued use of these tools. They found that while the workshops were effective for introducing the tools to students, many students found that using corpus tools is complicated and did not continue to use them after the workshop or only used the simplest features. They recommended having a follow-up workshop, soon after the first one, to increase the use of corpus tools by students. The deciding factor seemed to be whether students understood the usefulness of various tool features, and making this clear in the workshop helps students incorporate use of corpus tools in their writing process.

As a contrast, Szita Szilvia (University of Leiden) gave a talk entitled Authentic data, natural priming: Using corpus-based resources with lower level learners and said that it is easy for lower level learners to get overwhelmed by the volume of data in a corpus and therefore when introducing corpus tools it is better to curate or limit the amount of data that students see; so, while still having access to authentic language, they are not overwhelmed. This is something that I think needs serious consideration in terms of implementing DDL tools in ALESS.

Overall, when it comes to using DDL in the classroom, there was a consensus that this approach is useful for both engaging students and facilitating student learning, however, it seems that finding the best way to apply it in the classroom greatly depends on the goals of the class and the level of the learners. Regarding my own teaching, I think a useful strategy would be to introduce corpus tool early in the semester using a corpus of instructor-selected materials and continuing to reinforce use throughout the semester.

Several talks dealt with describing and characterizing various corpora, in particular research or scientific articles. They frequently used Multi-Dimensional analysis to identify common features and characterize their corpora, so I thought that this would be a useful approach to analyze the ALESS corpus and I am planning to do this analysis in the future. Additionally, after listening to several talks about learner corpora, I realized that the ALESS corpus needs to be annotated more extensively, particularly in terms of parts of speech (this can be done automatically) and errors (this would need to be done manually) in order to make it a more useful resource.

Finally, I think DDL might be an approach that other teachers would be interested in incorporating into their teaching in the future. I plan to report my experience of using DDL in ALESS is the faculty development lunches and also would be interested in organizing workshops to introduce DDL to interested Komaba faculty.

Abstract of my talk:

Use and misuse of lexical bundles in a learner corpus of IMRaD-style papers written by Japanese undergraduate studentsAlexandra V Terashima (University of Tokyo, Japan) and Douglas Roland (Waseda University, Japan)

Use of formulaic language, such as lexical bundles, has been increasingly employed as a basis for assessing and characterizing learner writing. The current study describes the use of formulaic language by Japanese undergraduate students in academic writing. We created a learner corpus consisting of scientific-style papers written by first year Japanese undergraduate students as a final product of semester-long compulsory academic writing course taught in English (Active Learning of English for Science Students or ALESS). The papers follow an A+IMRaD format and are based on a simple, original experiment that students devise and carry out early in the semester, as part of the course. For most students,

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this course is their first encounter with reading and writing in the academic genre in English. The aims of our research were to identify the most common 4-word lexical bundles in the ALESS corpus and compare the use of bundles between professional and student writers. Comparing the 100 most frequent 4-word clusters in the ALESS corpus to 1000 most frequent 4-word clusters in two reference corpora, we found that roughly half (49) appeared only in the ALESS corpus suggesting that these word clusters are overused by ALESS students. Comparing the 1000 most frequent 4-word clusters in the ALESS corpus to 100 most frequent 4-word clusters in the two reference corpora, we found that 84 clusters from both reference corpora are not found among the 1000 most frequent ALESS clusters. Of these, 18 occurred in both reference corpora and tended to be used for more conceptual or abstract writing. We additionally examined the use of frequent word clusters in context and found that some, although grammatically correct, are not used correctly by student writers. For example, while the clusters the relationship between the and the effect of the are frequent in the ALESS and both the reference corpora, in student writing these are often preceded by about while this combination does not occur in either the reference corpora. We are now continuing the analysis by increasing the number of papers in the ALESS corpus and also classifying the bundles in terms of grammatical structure and function. We will describe our findings in detail, report results of additional analyses and discuss pedagogical implications for English learners and instructors.

Corpus tools:

1. #lancsbox http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/2. CQPWeb https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk3. SketchEngline https://www.sketchengine.eu4. iWeb (https://www.english-corpora.org/iweb/)5. Lawrence Anthony’s corpus tools: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html

Photos:

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My presentation

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In front of Cardiff University

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Cardiff City Hall

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