Introduction to Corpus Technology for Language Learning This chapter introduces the International Perspectives on Corpus technology for language learning seminar series and discusses the launch of season four. It also mentions a previous special series that introduced an Open Access textbook containing ready-made data-driven learning (DDL) lessons. The focus of today's session is a new Corpus tool developed based on feedback from real secondary students in Australia.
"Data-Driven Learning" - Using Corpora for Language Teaching and Learning "Data-Driven Learning" (DDL) refers to the direct use of corpus linguistics in education, where teachers and students consult corpora through various tools to analyze language patterns. DDL involves reading concordance lines, analyzing keyword lists, examining collocate information, and using visualizations like word scatter plots. This approach allows learners to understand authentic text across different domains while promoting discovery learning at an individual level.
Challenges in Implementing Data-Driven Learning with Younger Learners Implementing DDL with younger learners faces several barriers such as pedagogic processing issues due to complex or inappropriate content, lack of software designed specifically for young learners' needs, corporate literacy challenges among both teachers and students who may require training in corpus techniques.
Improving Writing through Corpus Training The study involved 40 nine to ten-year-old students taking a physical science selective course. They were given purpose-built online training on the use of corpus tools, specifically focusing on passive voice constructions. Experimental tasks and surveys were conducted before and after the training to assess improvement in knowledge and usage of corpora.
"Girls Perform Better in Productive Task" "In a productive task where students had to use passive voice constructions, girls performed significantly better than boys in the post-test. This suggests that their use of passive voice improved following corpus training."
Student Perceptions and Preferences for Corpus Tools Students reported positive perceptions towards using corpora for language-related issues but expressed dissatisfaction with existing tools due to complexity or lack of user-friendliness. They preferred simple, fast tools that allow easy comparison of results across different queries.
Topic Areas in School Curricula The video discusses how the tool condenses a wide range of topics into 20 commonly found areas in secondary school and university curricula, including geography, biology, mathematics, culture, history, general science (which includes smaller subjects), English language and literature technology physics politics chemistry.
"Wildcard", "Question Mark" and "Slash" Operators 'Wildcard', 'question mark', and 'slash' are three main operators used by the tool. The wildcard operator allows for flexible searches using an example given on the front page. The question mark operator checks optional word occurrences to identify unnecessary words or articles. The slash works as an all-operator between two words to determine if they are indefinite or definite articles.
Improved Concordance Display The tool automatically sorts concordances based on frequency of four-gram constructions with search terms combined with frequent three-word combinations that follow them. Clickable arrows hide repeated results for more efficient pattern exploration within scientific language data.
Lesson Planning Ideas and Corpus Tools Trainees are coming up with lesson planning ideas involving the use of Corpus tools. Feedback is encouraged through a feedback form on the Corpus Made homepage. One potential tool discussed is VersaText, which allows for hiding quick results to facilitate multiple choice or fill in the gap activities.
"Using Language Data to Learn about Language" Book Recommendation "Using Language Data to Learn about Language" is an open-source book with ready-made DDL (Data-Driven Learning) lesson plans suitable for learners of different proficiency levels in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Although it doesn't currently utilize Corpus Made tools, some activities can be adapted using the platform.
Q&A Session: Platform Features and Integration Possibilities Questions were answered regarding features such as explanatory videos for using corpora effectively, transferring corpus lines to other platforms like Word or Google Docs (possible via copy-pasting), normalizing results when comparing corpora sizes (to be implemented soon), searching by topic directly from search box errors encountered due to unsupported query language syntaxes