Constructivist concordancing for EAP
Przemysław Kaszubski
School of EnglishAdam Mickiewicz University
Poznan, Poland
TOC
• IFAConc: What and Why?• IFAConc: How?
– Before and After 2010– Quantity and Quality– What has worked (so far); What has not (yet) ...
• What next?
IFAConc: What?• e-learning prototype• ESP / EAP assistant concordancer• for computer-savyy and computer-naive students• task-based noticing• relevant cross-corpus patterns• KWiC concordances and simple statistical counts• design feature – hyperlinkability
– corpora searches with unique URLs– history of searches – filterable, bookmarkable, linkable
Limitations
• Not a “Mark Davies” application:– Small / restricted corpora– Graphics / layout not top-notch– Can be slow
• All these (and more) add to my challenge ...
IFAConc: Why?• QUALITY: Guidance towards more natural use of (relevant) English:
– away from EFL learner-like, towards native-user like
– away from student-like (apprentice), towards professional-like (expert)
– raising / restoring awareness: language, metalanguage
– monitoring and assisting authentication
– registering needs and trends in tool use
• QUANTITY: Integration with teaching / marking tasks = more opportunities
– for training
– for learning / revising knowledge
– for authenticating
– quantity important – cf. U-shape effect
• Towards integration with Web 2.0 and e-learning:
– CMC element in DDL fuelled by trends in social networking (soc. constructivism)
– :: better students might become T assistants
– tool for action research and teacher development (teacher authentication)
Authentication with IFAConc: How ?
• Authentication:– re-contextualisation, adaptation
– NOT simple copy-paste
(cf. Gavioli and Aston 2001)
• Issues:
– How many students, how often, and under what conditions will be able, and inclined to, authenticate?
• Quantity & Quality– DDL tools needed to help maximize / optimize authentication
• regular syllabus tasks• peripheral learning (corpus consultations) tasks
Some stats 2008-2011Users Searches Annotations S / U A / U A / S
2008-9ZaoLec 141 10821 508 76,7 3,6 4,7%
2009-10Zao3 106 3287 169 31,0 1,6 5,1%
2010-11Zao3 115 9322 956 81,1 8,3 10,3%
2009MA2AcDis 28 891 64 31,8 2,3 7,2%
2009a2MAAcDc 22 872 86 39,6 3,9 9,9%
2010-11AcDc 21 1746 135 83,1 6,4 7,7%
IFAConc How? (Some) typical tasks
• (initial training)• links in distributed EAP material• (feedback links in students’ texts)
– self-correction decision(s) required• (personal recommendations for searches and tasks)• 1-2 annotations to do per week:
– prompted by IFAConc (starter page, RSS in Moodle, etc.)– selected by student
• T-S discussion / co-annotation of some findings• (T-S-S co-annotation of common issues)
– informed by S monitoring• (personal EAP / ESP corpora – compile and use)• (sharing of personal corpora)
How ? – Some examples and details
Resources / Help / Self-training
Example comment and reply
Corpora Search: Before 2010 (starter)
Corpora Search: After 2010 (starter)
Corpora Search: Before 2010 (result)
Corpora Search: After 2010 (result)
Context view: Before 2010
Context view: After 2010
Feedback linkBy comparison of
Annotated feedback link: after 2010
NN* , like
actually, this case not successfully resolved
User monitoring (1)
User monitoring (2)
User monitoring (3)
Teacher annotation / authentication (1)
(2)
Personal and Shared corpora
To be able to add a personal corpus:
• the corpus should be no greater than about 50,000 words
• the corpus must be in plain-text format (.txt)
• the corpus must be all in a single file
• the first two lines of the corpus file must be left blank.
Not much success yet..
Successes (so far)
• Adding more interactive features has affected:QUANTITY:
– More students search more and annotate more
– More students continue also after course
QUALITY
– Students annotate more complex queries
– More interesting T-S discussions / co-annotations
• Thus:– Better chances for successful S-S group involvement
– More student-coauthored material likely to feed Shared History
What next ... / In progress... (1)• Exploit History to refine / subclassify link-driven starting prompts:
– learner overuse / underuse patterns ; disciplinary language (positive vs negative)
– positioning / subgenres / academic functions: patterns associated with citing, descriptions of methods etc.
• Expand / enhance corpora search interactive options:
– other users (today) have searched for...
– improved pointers to related searches
– the most popular searches (for this search category) ...
• Improve learner monitoring / reporting
– eg. History threading
• explore other / more specific S-S collaboration tasks:
– concordance-illustrated usage guide co-edited on google docs, wiki etc.
– improve / explore / exploit personal / shared corpus experience
Sample: Likely overuse / underuse cases
For critical contextual evaluation / authentication etc
Sample: Positive / negative priming candidates for critical literary papers
(esp. as opposed to linguistics)
What next (2)
• Extend reference:– plug in API’s from other (big) (general) corpus
seach engines and dictionaries
– Maybe you can help with these?
Some Bibliography
[AWL] Coxhead, Averil. 2000. "A new Academic Word List", TESOL Quarterly 34, 2: 213-238.
Gavioli, Laura and Guy Aston. 2001. "Enriching reality: Language corpora in language pedagogy", ELT Journal 55, 3: 238-246.
Mishan, Freda. 2004. "Authenticating corpora for language learning: a problem and its resolution", ELT Journal 58, 3: 219-27.
[AFL] Simpson-Vlach, Rita and Nick C. Ellis. 2010. "An Academic Formulas List: New methods in phraseology research", Applied Linguistics 31,4: 487–512.
Tribble, Christopher. 2002. "Corpora and corpus analysis: New windows on academic writing", in: John Flowerdew (ed.), Academic discourse, 131- 149.
Widdowson, Henry G. 1998. "Communication and community: The pragmatics of ESP", English for Specific Purposes 17, 1: 3-14.