IBLT summary, Week 6
Matthew Hobden
Summary one: Tracking
learners’ actual uses of corpora: guided vs non-guided corpus consultation
Classes (Perez-Paredes
etal 2011) is an article that discusses the use of logs to track the actual use
of corpus based resources student’s use. The study used Fiddler logs to track
two separate second year university groups of 37 students whom had never
previously used the corpora in the course. One group was the control group (CG)
and had no previous training on how to use corpora and had a guided session.
The other experimental group (EG) had training and guidance on how to use the
corpora. Both groups completed two focus-on-form tasks based on a short story
from their text book. The experiment was conducted over a week and focused on
three activites; observe, search the corpus, and then rewrite. It was found
that the EG visited more websites than the CG, used the BNC more often, and
used more diverse sites. However both groups had high ratios of browser events,
as Perez-Paredes etal (2011) explain, “…these individuals have spent their
youth in direct contact with digital media…” (p.247). Perhaps by using this
digital nativeness teachers can use the corpus more often in the class. The
students seem already familiar with the technology and could enjoy doing so.
Summary two: The
Potential of Corpus-Informed L2 Pedagogy (Reinhardt 2010) is an article that compliments Davies’ (2008)
work on the basics of corpus analysis and delves deeper into the pedagogical
application of corpus-based theory, and also provides reasons as to why L2
teaching practices do not reflect corpus linguistics. There have been various arguments
as to how affective corpus related use is to the ESL classroom. Learners may be
able to analyze linguistic form in a given text, however there is so much
information in the corpus it might overwhelm the student. Also the fact that
most corpora are collections of native speaker uses, it could disempower
students as they try to reach an unattainable goal. As Reinhardt (2010) states,
“…this perspective is seen to disempower learners and reduce their agency in
the learning process” (p.242). Although there have been many arguments,
Reindhardt’s paper suggests that the future for using corpus linguistics in the
class is positive if the target language is selected carefully beforehand and
by including both top down and bottom up inductive methods equally. Could this
be the future for all ESL classes?
Compare and Contrast.
The Perez-Paredes etal (2011) paper focuses
on a study that was implemented with advanced university level students. They
stated that, “user tracking is essential to claim research and results validity”,
(p.249). So in order to prove the findings of using corpus linguistics in the
classroom an expensive tracking system needed to be implemented. This was
mentioned in the paper as being both costly and time consuming. What is not
mentioned is the fact that this could be an invasion of the learner’s privacy
as researchers track all activity learners do online. Reinhardt (2010) does not
focus on any study carried out in an ESL classroom but rather presents ideas
and theories, both negative and positive, and brings them together with a final
outlook at the future of corpus linguistics in ESL. What is interesting is no
mention of tracking student’s activity online is mentioned. Rather the paper
focuses on the importance of the history of the corpus in class, and why it is
not used in the ESL classroom as often as it perhaps should be. By focusing the
TL the students may not feel so overwhelmed, however the case of students
feeling overwhelmed or not was not mentioned in Perez-Paredes’ etal study. It
could be the researchers overlooked this aspect, or is it possible the students
are so used to using online tools that no matter how much information is
surrounding them, they do not feel any sense of stress or feeling of being
overwhelmed?
Clarification Question: After reading both papers I would like to know what the exact
differences are between CALL (Computer assisted language learning), and DDL
(data-driven learning).
Application Question: It is clear that the use of corpus resources seems to suit
advanced learner’s needs more so than lower level learner’s needs. Is there a
way to utilize corpus resources in such a way so that it benefits lower level
learners as much as the higher levels?
References
Pascual
Perez-Paredes, Maria Sanchez-Tornel, Jose Maria Alacaraz & Pilar Aguado
Jimenez (2001):
Tracking learners’ actual uses of corpora: guided vs non guided
corpus consultation, Computer Assisted Language Learning, 24:3, 233-253
Reinhardt
Jonathon (2010): The Potential of Corpus-Informed L2 Pedagogy, Studies in
Hispanic
and
Lusophone Linguistics, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2010
