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Assessing Development of Advanced Proficiency through Learner Corpora |
| While learner corpora, as with their native-speaker counterparts, have been used to compile dictionaries and grammars for learners based on typical problems and errors of usage found in learner data, they can also be used by teachers and learners themselves to observe and assess their own and one another's performance in a more relaxed and more anonymous way, without the strains of real-time monitoring. Even relatively small corpora consisting of 10,000 words can yield a massive amount of usage data. Such data can then be compared with, for example, native-speaker corpora to reveal what learners are not using, as well as how correctly or appropriately they are using the target language. Moreover, learner corpora can be diagnostic, tracking the progress of learners over the course of a semester, a year or a longer time period. Thus, learner corpora represent concrete empirical evidence of language development. |
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CORPUS PORTAL: CALPER's Corpus Portal is is a gateway to information and tools for teachers interested in exploring ways in which corpus data can be used in language teaching, learning and assessment.
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OTHER MATERIALS:
Professional Development Documents. Currently there are two documents available that language educators can download free of charge for their professional development library:
- "Using a Corpus in Language Teaching" [October 2003]
- "Using Corpora in Language Teaching" [November 2004]
Powerpoint presentation at ACTFL 2006 in Nashville
James P. Lantolf and Steven L. Thorne. "Tracking Learning: Using Corpus Linguistics to Assess Language Development"
[View Powerpoint]
Powerpoint presentation at the 3rd UC Language Consortium Conference, 2006 at UCLA
Hongyin Tao. "Developing Teaching Materials with Authentic Data and Corpus Analysis Tools" [View Powerpoint]
Summer Institute in Applied Linguistics
Computational and Statistical Methods for Corpus Analysis
July 6-17, 2009 ..... 4:15pm - 6:15pm
Hands-on introduction to the core and advanced computational and statistical methods for analyzing corpus data.
This course will provide a hands-on introduction to the core and advanced computational and statistical methods for analyzing corpus data. We will first introduce some of the state-of-the-art computational tools for text processing and linguistic annotation (including lexical, morphological, and syntactic annotation). We will follow with a demonstration of tools that can be used to effectively query raw and linguistically annotated (including part-of-speech tagged and syntactically parsed) corpora to extract occurrences of specific linguistic patterns and grammatical structures. Next, we will cover some of the most essential statistical methods used in analyzing and interpreting information extracted from text corpora. We will conclude with a discussion on how these methods have been combined in recent corpus-based studies and how they may be implemented in student-proposed research projects. This course will be highly applied, and there will be substantial opportunities for demonstrations, exercises, and discussions. Prior experience in computational and statistical analysis is not assumed. By the end of the course, students will be expected to have a good grasp of the computational and statistical techniques necessary for processing, annotating, and analyzing corpus data. Evaluation will be based on the completion of a short take-home assignment for students who register for graduate credit.
Instructor: Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University
This course can be taken for credit or non-credit. For more information please visit Penn State Outreach: 2009 Summer Institute in Applied Linguistics Website
Summer Institute in Applied Linguistics
A Conceptualization-based Approach to Grammar: Corpus, Discourse Analysis, and Cognitive Linguistics
July 6-17, 2009 ..... 4:15pm - 6:15pm
Using conceptual grammar, provides overview of English and compares English with Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Persian.
This course is based on a conceptual grammar (Strauss, 2006; Strauss, Lee, and Ahn, 2006) approach to language analysis and pedagogy. Conceptual grammar combines three theoretical/methodological paradigms: discourse analysis, corpus, and cognitive linguistics. Using this approach, the course will provide an overview of English grammar as viewed from the perspective of conceptualization. As a means of comparison and contrast, the course will also examine grammatical constructions in Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Persian with respect to such traditional issues as definiteness, tense and aspect, motion verbs, and perception verbs. We will observe that when speakers select grammatical forms (in any language), they are generally making choices over other possible, competing forms within that linguistic system, and in so doing, express elements of speaker stance, cognition, interaction, and culture. The approach is applicable to first- and second/foreign-language teaching and learning environments. No previous knowledge of or experience with corpus, DA, or cognitive linguistics is required.Instructor: Susan Strauss, Penn State University
This course can be taken for credit or non-credit. For more information please visit Penn State Outreach: 2009 Summer Institute in Applied Linguistics Website
Project Directors:
Michael McCarthy, Professor Emeritus, The University of Nottingham and Xiaofei Lu, Assistant Professor, Penn State
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