Aula Magna Language Learning Roundtable
Aug 24, 2022 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM(Europe/Amsterdam)
20220824T1330 20220824T1530 Europe/Amsterdam Language Learning Round Table: Corpora as resource for second language research and teaching. Opportunities and challenges (part 1)

The use of corpora is a traditional tool for studying second language development and acquisition. The creation of the large longitudinal corpus within the ESF project (Perdue 1993), for example, has had a major impact on research in the field of SLA. 

The advent of the Internet and especially the possibility of storing and sharing large databases has facilitated access to corpora. As a result, the beginning of the 21st century has seen the rise of corpus linguistics, as well as the development of software to facilitate transcription and coding (e.g. CLAN, MacWhinney 2002), and tools for automatic data analysis (e.g. TreeTagger).

This digital evolution has stimulated approaches that focus on language as "parole"/"speech", such as the usage-based approach (Bybee 2008, N. Ellis 2002). Furthermore, the possibility of comparing target language corpora with learner production has brought about a better understanding of the role of input in second language acquisition.

Aula Magna EuroSLA 31 susanne.obermayer@unifr.ch
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The use of corpora is a traditional tool for studying second language development and acquisition. The creation of the large longitudinal corpus within the ESF project (Perdue 1993), for example, has had a major impact on research in the field of SLA. 

The advent of the Internet and especially the possibility of storing and sharing large databases has facilitated access to corpora. As a result, the beginning of the 21st century has seen the rise of corpus linguistics, as well as the development of software to facilitate transcription and coding (e.g. CLAN, MacWhinney 2002), and tools for automatic data analysis (e.g. TreeTagger).

This digital evolution has stimulated approaches that focus on language as "parole"/"speech", such as the usage-based approach (Bybee 2008, N. Ellis 2002). Furthermore, the possibility of comparing target language corpora with learner production has brought about a better understanding of the role of input in second language acquisition.

Methodology and design in corpus-based SLA research
Language Learning Round Table 01:40 PM - 02:20 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2022/08/24 11:40:00 UTC - 2022/08/24 12:20:00 UTC
Understanding the ways in which speakers use an additional language and how that ability emerges and changes over time constitutes a major focus of SLA research to date. A dominant approach to investigating this question has involved studies of production, which have documented how speakers use specific linguistic features (e.g., articles), multi-word combinations, as well as broader linguistic and/or discourse-level patterns. One particularly fruitful method for researching L2 usage includes corpus linguistic analyses of learner corpora. Not only has corpus-based SLA majorly informed what we know about the routes and rates of L2 learning, including specific roles for context, input, and individual factors in learning, but these approaches have helped refine and advance theories about L2 learning. However, despite these well-documented strengths and the considerable potential of corpus-based SLA research for growing the field, reviews have repeatedly noted limitations in the design, documentation, and exploitation of learner corpora. These concerns appear particularly acute for longitudinal research given the desire/need to document and compare L2 abilities over extended periods of time. In this presentation, I focus on the design and implementation of tasks in corpus-based SLA research, drawing on recent investigations of how L2 abilities emerge and develop using cross-sectional and longitudinal learner corpora. I pay particular attention to longitudinal research designs given (i) their rarity and (ii) their importance for better understanding the processes of L2 learning. Recommendations for the design and implementation of tasks in corpus-based SLA research are proposed.


Presenters
KM
Kevin McManus
Associate Professor, The Pennsylvania State University
From L1 to L2 phonological corpora: methodological lessons from the (I)PFC experience
Language Learning Round Table 02:20 PM - 03:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2022/08/24 12:20:00 UTC - 2022/08/24 13:00:00 UTC
With the development of corpus linguistics and data-based applied linguistics in the 1990s, the number of learner corpora worldwide has risen steadily over the past two decades, with a strong focus on lexical and grammatical constructions. It is only recently that the movement bridging corpus linguistics and second language phonology started to gain momentum (Gut 2014), especially from an educational perspective (Biber 2019, Detey 2020). In the field of French corpus phonology, the PFC project (Phonologie du Français Contemporain: usages, variétés et structure), which was launched more than twenty years ago (Durand, Laks, Lyche 2002), stands as a rather unique research program. Originally designed to refresh L1 French phonology data through a Labovian network of comparable surveys across the French-speaking world, it has led to both educational (PFC-EF) and SLA research-oriented (IPFC) (Detey & Kawaguchi 2008; Racine et al. 2012) offshoots over the past 15 years. Adjusting the PFC research protocol and processing guidelines (Racine et al. 2011) from native to non-native data proved to be both challenging and inspiring vis-à-vis the objectives and the multidisciplinary nature of the L2 branch of the project. In this presentation, we will describe how these adjustments took place, with a particular focus on the tasks involved in our recording protocol as well as on the value of data comparability across different populations of native and non-native speakers, which we will illustrate with data from both the PFC and the IPFC corpora.
References
Biber, D. (2019). Corpus analysis of spoken discourse. Research findings, prospects, implications for teaching. Plenary talk. PSLLT2019. Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University.
Detey, S. (2020). Teaching and language corpora: what of pronunciation? Insights from French. Plenary Talk. 14th Teaching and Language Corpora conference (TaLC2020). Perpignan: University of Perpignan.
Detey, S. & Kawaguchi, Y. (2008). Interphonologie du Français Contemporain (IPFC) : récolte automatisée des données et apprenants japonais. Journées PFC : Phonologie du français contemporain : variation, interfaces, cognition. Paris : MSH.
Durand, J., Laks, B., and Lyche, C. (2002). La phonologie du français contemporain : usages, variétés et structure. In: C. Pusch, and W. Raible (eds), Romance Corpus Linguistics – Corpora and Spoken Language. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 93-106.
Gut, U. (2014). Corpus phonology and second language acquisition. In: J. Durand, U. Gut, and G. Kristoffersen (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 286-301.
Racine, I., Detey, S., Zay, F., and Kawaguchi, Y. (2012). Des atouts d'un corpus multitâches pour l'étude de la phonologie en L2 : l'exemple du projet « Interphonologie du français contemporain » (IPFC). In: A. Kamber, and C. Skupiens (eds), Recherches récentes en FLE. Bern: Peter Lang, 1-19.
Racine, I., Zay, F., Detey, S. and Kawaguchi, Y. (2011). De la transcription de corpus à l'analyse interphonologique : enjeux méthodologiques en FLE. In : G. Col, and S. N. Osu (eds), Transcrire, écrire, Formaliser. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Travaux Linguistiques du CerLiCO 24 : 13-30.
Presenters
IR
Isabelle Racine
Université De Genève
Co-authors
SD
Sylvain Detey
Professor Of Applied Linguistics And French Studies; Vice Dean Of GSICCS, SILS & GSICCS, Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan)
Associate Professor
,
The Pennsylvania State University
Université de Genève
 Katharina Karges
Institute of Multilingualism (University of Fribourg)
Associate Professor
,
University of Leeds
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