This talk discusses some of our findings in
Pérez-Paredes, P., & Sánchez Tornel, M. (2015). A multidimensional analysis of learner language during story reconstruction in interviews. In M. Callies & S. Götz (Eds.), Learner Corpora in Language Testing and Assessment. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Satellite of SLaTE 2015: L1 Teaching, Learning and Technology
Satellite of Satellite of INTERSPEECH 2015, Leipzig, Germany, September 3, 2015
Due date full paper submission: May 1, 2015
The aim of this 1-day SoS (Satellite of a Satellite) workshop is to bridge the gap between researchers in education and researchers in speech and text processing technology by organizing a joint event where researchers from one workshop are able to visit the other workshop to get an idea of the respective positions on the state of the art on the topic of language and technology in education.
The SoS workshop intends to join researchers across countries on the topic of language teaching/learning. In contrast to SLaTE, papers submitted here do not have to employ any technology yet. We are looking for contributions from users that may not be aware of all the possibilities that the technologies have to offer to solve educational research problems. What these papers bring to the table are problem statements and data collections that the speech and text processing community may in turn not be aware of. Thus we are looking for symbioses between the two disciplines in research about learning/teaching language. Topics should include information about collection, annotation and free sharing of data for research purposes. Automation in data analysis and children’s applications for learning L1 and foreign language are equally important to share between researchers.
Submissions are expected to be formal papers that will be submitted to an international double-blind review process. It is important for both areas to get to know each others research questions and potential application for technologies. Key to this will be provided by this side-by-side platform that allows you to meet people with similar interests, share our work and forge new interactions across disciplines. In doing so, we are looking for a broad range of contributions from didactics, psychology and pedagogy from researchers interested in bridging the current gap to automation. Demonstrations as well as samples of data collections and annotations are welcome.
Understanding Language: Learning and Teaching starts April 20 (Link)
Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching starts April 20 (Link)
Big Data: Measuring and Predicting Human Behaviour starts April 20 (Link)
Exploring English: Language and Culture starts June 22 (Link)
All of them Futurelearn courses
Corpus Linguistics for ELT: Research and Practice
Ivor Timmis
From the introduction:
The challenge of fostering a fruitful relationship between corpus linguistics and ELT was clearly set out by Conrad (2000: 556):
Corpus grammarians must strive to reach more audiences that include
teachers and must emphasize concrete pedagogical applications … In fact,
the strongest force for change could be a new generation of ESL teachers who
were introduced to corpus-based research in their training programs [and]
have practiced conducting their own corpus investigations and designing materials based on corpus research.
Indeed, this comment by Conrad encapsulates the main aim of this book: to help move corpus linguistics from what Römer (2012) terms its ‘minority sport’ status in language teaching to a point where the ability to carry out and interpret corpus research is seen as a normal part of an English language teacher’s repertoire.
Familiarity with corpus research and practice should be a standard part of an English language teacher’s toolkit, I would argue, because most people in ELT will at some time have had thoughts like these:
• How many words do my learners need to learn?
• Why is everyone talking about lexical chunks and collocations?
• Do my students really need this grammar point?
• Which words should I use to exemplify this structure?
• Am I teaching my learners language they will need to use when they speak the language?
• Does the grammar explanation in the coursebook really reflect how we use this structure?
• What vocabulary do my English for dentistry students need to get their teeth into?
If you have had questions like these, this book is designed to help you to answer them by consulting corpora and corpus-informed literature. It is also designed to help you to generate and investigate similar questions. It is, however, important to keep corpora in perspective throughout this book.
The argument presented here is that corpora are a resource and a reference source and, as is the case with all resources, pedagogic judgement is vitally important in determining how and when
they are deployed to best effect.
The book does not assume prior knowledge or experience of corpus research; nor does it assume any technical expertise. Technophobes can relax: contemporary corpus interfaces and corpus software are user-friendly and often include tutorial packages. The tasks in this book will help to familiarise readers with publicly available user-friendly corpora such as the British National Corpus hosted at
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
Through the Corpora List
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http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/summerschool
Lancaster University, UK – 14th to 17th July 2015
Since 2010, Lancaster University has run a highly successful series of free-to attend summer training events. In 2015, we will for the first time be running two corpus linguistics events in parallel:
Sponsored by UCREL at Lancaster University – one of the world’s leading and longest-established centres for corpus-based research – and by the ESRC-funded CASS project, these events’ aim is to support students of language and linguistics in the development of advanced skills in corpus methods.
Both are intended primarily for postgraduate research students (and secondarily for Masters-level students, postdoctoral researchers, and others); both assume at least a basic knowledge of corpus linguistics (but in the case of the Statistics Summer School, no knowledge of statistics is assumed).
The four-day programme consists of a series of intensive two-hour sessions, some involving practical work, others more discussion-oriented. Some sessions are shared across the two events. The instructors include, as well as speakers from Lancaster University, external guest speakers who are prominent specialists in their respective areas.
For a list of topics and speakers in the UCREL Summer School in Corpus Linguistics, see http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/summerschool/corpusling.php
For a list of topics and speakers in the UCREL/CASS Summer School in Statistics for Corpus Linguistics, see http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/summerschool/stats.php
These events are part of a larger set of five co-located Lancaster Summer Schools in Interdisciplinary Digital Methods; the other events include training in corpus methods directed at non-linguists; see the website for further information:
http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/summerschool
Note that the summer schools run the week immediately before the Corpus Linguistics 2015 conference, for the benefit of anyone who might wish to attend both.
How to register
Our Summer Schools are free to attend, but registration in advance is compulsory, as places are limited.
The deadline for registrations is Sunday 7th June 2015, but we cannot guarantee that places will still be available at that point!
The application forms are available on the event website here as is further information on the programme.
The eighth international Corpus Linguistics conference (CL2015) will be held at Lancaster University from Tuesday 21st July 2015 to Friday 24th July 2015. The main conference will be preceded by a workshop day on Monday 20th July.
This series of conferences began in 2001 with an event celebrating the career of Professor Geoffrey Leech, on the occasion of his retirement. In August of 2014, we reported with great sadness Geoff’s sudden death.
By dedicating this eighth conference in the Corpus Linguistics series once again to a celebration of Geoff’s life, his career, and his truly remarkable influence on the field, we once more pay tribute to, and commemorate, a remarkable intellect and a sorely-missed colleague and friend.
Conference themes and topics
The goals of the conference are:
. To gather together current and developing research in the study and application of corpus linguistics; . To push the field forwards by promoting dialogue among the many different users of corpora across interconnected sub-disciplines of linguistics – be they descriptive, theoretical, applied or computational; . To explore new challenges both within corpus linguistics, and in the extension of corpus approaches to new fields of study.
CL2015 will have three thematic streams and a general programme.
Stream A: A tribute to Geoffrey Leech
For this stream we invite contributions using corpus methods in any of the branches of linguistics with which Geoffrey Leech’s research was especially closely associated, namely:
. Pragmatics
. Stylistics
. Description of English grammar and grammatical change . Grammatical annotation of corpus texts
Stream B: Discourse, Politics and Society
For this stream we invite contributions in the following areas:
. The use of corpora in discourse analysis . Corpus approaches to the study of new media . Applications of corpus approaches in the social sciences and humanities
Stream C: Language learning and teaching
For this stream we invite contributions in the following areas:
. Learner corpus research
. Corpus-based work in English language teaching, including ESP and EAP . Use of corpora in second language acquisition studies . Data-driven learning . Development of learner materials
General Programme
For the general programme, we invite contributions on as broad and inclusive a basis as possible. The areas in which we particularly welcome submissions include but are not limited to:
. Corpus methodology:
o Critical explorations of existing measures and methods in corpus linguistics; o New methods and techniques in corpus development, annotation and analysis; o New tools and techniques developed in corpus-based computational linguistics; o Advances in quantitative techniques.
. Theoretical corpus linguistics:
o The interface between corpus and linguistic theory; o Syntax, morphology, semantics; o Psycholinguistic and cognitive explorations; o Multi-lingual comparative and contrastive analysis; o Historical linguistics.
. Lexis and lexicon:
o Lexicography;
o Collocation and meaning in context.
. Sociolinguistics, language variation and applied linguistics:
o Regional and social variation in language; o Code-switching and bilingualism; o Forensic linguistics; o Genre, register and textual variation.
Plenary speakers
We are delighted to announce that the following speakers have accepted our invitation to give plenary lectures at CL2015:
. Douglas Biber (Northern Arizona University, USA) . Sylviane Granger (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) . Michaela Mahlberg (University of Nottingham, UK) . Alan Partington (Università di Bologna, Italy)
Call for pre-conference workshops
As noted above, CL2015 will include a workshop day on Monday 20th July 2015. We hereby issue a call for workshop proposals on any theme relevant to the conference.
“Workshops” may take two main forms.
The first type is the colloquium-style workshop, which operates as a mini-conference with its own programme committee and call for papers to be presented: proposals for this type of workshop should specify the scope of the workshop, who its organisers will be, and whether the creation of workshop proceedings is envisaged. Proposals should also provide an initial version of the text of the call for papers.
The other main type of workshop is a practical or applied workshop providing a demonstration of or training in some particular corpus linguistic technique or piece of software. In this case the proposal must explain the content of the workshop, provide an initial version of the text of a call for participation, and give an indication of the workshop’s IT requirements, if any.
We are also happy to consider innovative forms of workshop intermediate between colloquium-style workshop and practical workshop.
All proposals must in addition specify the proposed running time. Our timetable allows for the following lengths of workshop:
. Full-day workshop – up to 7 hours (plus lunch/breaks) . Half-day workshop – up to 3.5 hours (plus break) . Short workshop – up to 2 hours (single session)
There is no fixed format for workshop proposals, as long as they include all the details specified above. Proposals should be sent by email to Andrew Hardie by 15th December. We are happy to respond to informal expressions of interest in advance of formal submission of a proposal.
Call for papers, posters and panels
We invite submission of abstracts for papers, posters and panels on any topic relevant to the conference themes.
For this conference, we are requesting extended abstracts (750-1500 words), as we do not plan to produce a volume of conference proceedings. All abstracts will be peer-reviewed by the conference programme committee.
Paper presentations will consist of a 20 minute talk followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion. Please note: paper submissions should present either complete research, or research in progress where at least some substantial results have been achieved. Work in progress which has yet to produce results can instead be submitted as a poster abstract.
Submissions for panel discussions should take the form of a single 1500 word abstract on behalf of all speakers to be on the panel. The abstract should include a note to specify whether the panel is intended to be 1 hour or 1.5 hours in length.
Submissions for poster presentations should be shorter (400-750 words). We especially welcome poster abstracts that (a) report on innovative research that is in its very earliest phases (b) report on new software or corpus data resources.
We especially encourage abstract submissions from early-career researchers, including postgraduate research students and postdoctoral researchers.
All abstracts must be submitted via the conference website; the submission system is now live (see http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/cl2015/call.php ). Details on how to submit an abstract to a specific conference stream are available on the website.
Key dates
. End October 2014 – call for papers; call for proposals for pre-conference workshops .
7th January 2015 – deadline for abstract submission .
16th January 2015 – earlybird registration opens .
24th January 2015 – all abstract review outcomes will be returned by this date .
30th March 2015 – end of earlybird registration (rates rise) .
21st June 2015 – end of main registration (late registration not guaranteed, though we’ll try) .
21st June 2015 – final deadline for cancellation with refund of registration fees .
20th July 2015 – pre-conference workshop day .
21st July to 24th July 2015 – main conference
General information
For information on registration, accommodation travel etc., see the conference website: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/cl2015 ; email: cl2015@lancaster.ac.uk
The conference is hosted by the UCREL research centre (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk), which brings together the Department of Linguistics and English Language (http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/) with the School of Computing and Communications (http://www.scc.lancs.ac.uk/).
Local organising committee of CL 2015: Andrew Hardie (chair), Tony McEnery, Paul Rayson.
