Category: corpus linguistics

CFP Posters on late-breaking results June 15 deadline

Through the corpora list

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CORPUS LINGUISTICS 2015

The CL2015 organising committee is pleased to issue a call for posters on late-breaking results on any of the topics in the conference’s scope. By “late-breaking” we mean research which was not at a sufficiently advanced stage for an abstract submission to be made in the main submission cycle, but which has now reached that point.

We anticipate that the research in question will still be in its earliest phases. “Late-breaking results” include – but are not necessarily limited to – pilot study results, corpus creation activities currently in hand, newly-developed software, and so on.

· Abstracts should be 400-750 words in length. They must be formatted using the conference stylesheet (available to download from http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/cl2015/call.php )

· We especially encourage submission of abstracts from early-career researchers, including postgraduate research students and postdoctoral researchers.

· Abstracts which were previously submitted for the January deadline, and not accepted, are NOT eligible to be resubmitted.

· Abstracts should be submitted by email to cl2015@lancaster.ac.uk by 15th June 2014.

· As with all presentations, at least one author of any late-submission poster must attend the conference.
For more details see http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/cl2015

An archive copy of the previously-circulated CL2015 Call for Participation may be found here: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/cl2015/doc/CL2015-CallParticipation.pdf

Andrew Hardie, Tony McEnery, Amanda Potts, Vaclav Brezina, and Paul Rayson
The CL2015 Organising Committee

Adam Kilgarriff: a selection of papers and talks

Some readings to remember one of the most indisputably influential corpus linguists in the 20 and 21st centuries.

Using corpora for language research

https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/documentation/attachment/wiki/AK/Papers/SkE_for_lingResearch2013.ppt?format=raw

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

Native & learner language in interviews

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.

 

New book: Corpus Linguistics for ELT

Corpus_Linguistics_for_ELT__Research_and_Practice_-_Ivor_Timmis_-_Google_Libros

 

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/

CFP International Journal of Learner Corpus Research

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.