Some readings to remember one of the most indisputably influential corpus linguists in the 20 and 21st centuries.
Using corpora for language research
Googleology is bad science
http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/Publications/2007-K-CL-Googleology.pdf
Grammar is to meaning as the law is to good behaviour. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 3 (2): 195-198.
http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/Publications/2007-K-CLLT-grammarlaw.doc
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.
According to Prof. McEnery, people in conversations avoid using words such as “austerity”, only once in a 5 million corpus. Listen to the interview below.
Surprising? Don’t think so. “Expected” words do not crop up when data is examined. We have found that the UK legislation 2007-2011 on immigration does not include the lemma “immigrant” . Unexpected?
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/
The International Journal of Learner Corpus Research (IJLCR) is a forum for researchers who collect, annotate, and analyse computer learner corpora and/or use them to investigate topics in Second Language Acquisition and linguistic theory in general, inform foreign language teaching, develop learner-corpus-informed tools (e.g. courseware, proficiency tests, dictionaries and grammars) or conduct natural language processing tasks (e.g. annotation, automatic spell- and grammar-checking , L1 identification).
IJLCR aims to highlight the multidisciplinary and broad scope of practice that characterizes the field and publishes original research covering methodological, theoretical and applied work in any area of learner corpus research.
IJLCR features research papers, shorter research notes and reviews of books, corpora and software tools. The language of the journal is English. The journal will also publish special issues. All contributions are peer-reviewed.
IJLCR is now inviting submissions for Vol. 2 No. 1 (to be published in spring 2016).
For more information, visit the official website of the journal.
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.