IBLT summary, week 6

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