Temple Distinguished Lecture Series, November 5th

Learner Corpus Research

Professor:

     Dr. Yukio Tono (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan)

Schedule:

     Saturday, November 5, 14:00 - 21:00

     Sunday, November 6, 10:00 - 17:00

The primary purpose of this seminar is to explore how corpus linguistics as a methodology can contribute to SLA research and foreign language learning/teaching. The seminar will begin with a brief introduction to fundamental concepts in corpus linguistics, types of available corpora, and how corpora are used in different fields of applied linguistics. The lecture is then focused on learner corpus research and a discussion of various approaches, such as contrastive interlanguage analysis, that are used to explore learner corpora in SLA and ELT research.

The second day of the seminar will be dedicated to hands-on data processing using concordancers such as AntConc (for PC/Mac), CasualConc (for Mac), and KH-Coder (for PC). Participants will learn word analysis techniques in corpus linguistics, such as wordlists, keywords, collocations, n-grams, and P-frames. Participants will also explore the results of corpus search using multivariate analyses for data summarization and data modeling and discuss the merits and demerits of using corpora as a methodology to answer research questions. No previous familiarity with concordancers is necessary, but some prior knowledge of statistics is helpful.

Recommended Textbook:

• McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book. London, UK: Routledge. (Buy on Amazon.co.jp)
• Granger, S., Gilquin, G., & Meunier, F. (Eds.) (2015). The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Buy on Amazon.co.jp)