Using Small Corpora of Critiques to Set Pedagogical Goals in First Year ESP Business English

Wang, Yu-Chi,Davis, Richard Hill Institute for Corpus Research 2021 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.2 No.2

The current study explores small corpora of critiques written by Chinese and non-Chinese university students and how strategies used by these writers compare with high-rated L1 students. Data collection includes three small corpora of student writing; 20 student critiques in 2017, 23 student critiques from 2018, and 23 critiques from the online Michigan MICUSP collection at the University of Michigan. The researchers employ Text Inspector and Lexical Complexity to identify university students' vocabulary knowledge and awareness of syntactic complexity. In addition, WMatrix4® is used to identify and support the comparison of lexical and semantic differences among the three corpora. The findings indicate that gaps between Chinese and non-Chinese writers in the same university classes exist in students' knowledge of grammatical features and interactional metadiscourse. In addition, critiques by Chinese writers are more likely to produce shorter clauses and sentences. In addition, the mean value of complex nominal and coordinate phrases is smaller for Chinese students than for non-Chinese and MICUSP writers. Finally, in terms of lexical bundles, Chinese student writers prefer clausal bundles instead of phrasal bundles, which, according to previous studies, are more often found in texts of skilled writers. The current study's findings suggest incorporating implicit and explicit instruction through the implementation of corpora in language classrooms to advance skills and strategies of all, but particularly of Chinese writers of English.

A Corpus-Based Longitudinal Study of Diction in Chinese and British News Reports on Chang'e Project

Lu, Rong,Xie, Xue,Qi, Jiashuang,Ali, Afida Mohamad,Zhao, Jie Institute for Corpus Research 2022 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.3 No.1

As a milestone progression in China's space exploration history, Chang'e Project has attracted a lot of media attention since its first launching. This study aims to examine and compare the similarities and differences between the Chinese media and the British media in using nouns, verbs, and adjectives to report the Chang'e Project. After categorising the documents based on specific project phases, we created two diachronic corpora to explore the linguistic shifts and similarities and differences of diction employed by the Chinese and British media on the Chang'e Project ideology. This longitudinal study was performed with Lancsbox and the CLAWS web tagger through critical discourse analysis as the theoretical framework. The findings of the current study showed that the Chang'e Project coverage in both media increased on an annual basis, especially after 2019. In contrast to the objectivity and positivity in the Chinese Media, the British Media seemed to be more subjective with more appraisal adjectives in the news reports. Nonetheless, both countries were trying to be objective and formal in choosing nouns and verbs. Ideology-wise, the Chinese news media reports portrayed more positivity on domestic circumstances while the British counterpart was typically more critical. Notably, the study outcomes could catalyse future research on the Chang'e Project and facilitate diplomatic policies.

A Corpus-Based Study on Language Features and Literary Themes in the Yellow Wall-Paper and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Lu, Hui-Chuan,Liu, Kai-Ling,Yeh, Chien-Ting,Chen, Ya-Jie Institute for Corpus Research 2022 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.3 No.1

This study aims to apply corpus-based approach to analyze The Yellow Wall-Paper and Herland written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a women's rights activist in the late nineteenth-century America. Although both works have attracted feminists' attention to the woman question that concerned Gilman, discussion on her language features and their relation to the literary themes of these two works is still in need. In this corpus-based analysis, we argue that the main themes of different literary works can be revealed through linguistic patterns identified by number and gender features of nouns and pronouns in the contrast of two works and a balanced corpus. The linguistic features (number and gender) have been related with two themes, the 'group and individual' and the 'feminine and masculine', and are further interpreted in terms of mothering and feminine consciousness. By adopting linguistic approach, our study provides quantitative and qualitative evidence to verify the established themes and arguments of these literary texts.

Relative Clauses in a Modern Diachronic Corpus of Singapore English

Lee, Kit Mun Institute for Corpus Research 2020 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.1 No.1

This paper investigates changes in relativization in Singapore English broadsheet newspapers from 1993 to 2016. One of the first diachronic studies in Singapore English (SgE), it also explores corresponding data from the diachronic Siena-Bologna (SiBol) news corpus. As SgE is in the endonormative stabilization phase in Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of postcolonial Englishes, divergence from British English (BrE) is to be expected. In this study, the dataset is a new Singapore English Newspaper (SEN) corpus compiled from local news articles in 1993, 2005 and 2016, and the corpus tool employed is Sketch Engine. The results reveal changes in relativization practices in SEN over the given period, many of which occur in a similar pattern as those identified in SiBol, albeit at varying rates of change. Most significant of these include a sharp decline in the which relativizer in restrictive relative clauses with non-animate antecedents, complemented by a rise in that. The change has been so rapid that although which relative clauses were more common than that clauses in 1993, that has subsequently overtaken which for both the corpora. One shift in SEN that is different from SiBol is the increase in frequency of non-restrictive relative clauses in SgE. The likely motivators for the changes in the two varieties are identified as colloquialization, densification and prescriptivism. The effect each of these factors could have had on the varieties are discussed, as well as the implications that the findings have on our understanding of the evolutionary status of SgE as a postcolonial variety.

The Ratios of CEFR-J Vocabulary Usage Compared with GSL and AWL in Elementary EFL Classrooms and Suggestions of Vocabulary Items to be Taught

Ohashi, Yukiko,Katagiri, Noriaki Institute for Corpus Research 2020 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.1 No.1

The present study examined vocabulary usage in elementary English classrooms in Japan using elementary school corpus. The authors used three wordlists to benchmark the lexical items for four classes in the corpus: the CEFR-J, the General Service List (GSL), and Academic Word List (AWL). The percentage of vocabulary usage belonging to the Level A1 in the CEFR-J was below 15% (Class A: 12.1%, Class B: 12.6%, Class C: 8.9%, and Class D: 13.6%) with no statistical difference between levels. The mean ratio of Level A2 vocabulary items was below 10%, and all classes showed less than 1% of vocabulary usage for the Levels B1 and B2. Over 70% of all vocabulary items in the corpus belonged to the most frequent 1,000-word band (level 1) of the GSL, while the next most frequent word band (level 2 of the GSL and AWL) accounted for less than 10%. The results suggest that elementary school English teachers should use more vocabulary items in the CEFR-J Level A1. The findings demonstrate that elementary school teachers are less likely to expose their pupils to grammatically well-structured sentences with an abundance of lexical items since the teachers repeatedly use the same lexemes in each class.

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Crosslinguistic Influence on the Acquisition of Concessive Conditionals in L2 English

Newbery-Payton, Laurence Institute for Corpus Research 2022 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.3 No.1

This study examines crosslinguistic influence on the use of concessive conditionals by Japanese EFL learners. Contrastive analysis suggests that Japanese native speakers may overuse the concessive conditional even if due to partial similarities to Japanese concessive conditionals, whose formal and semantic restrictions are fewer than those of English concessive conditionals. This hypothesis is tested using data from the written module of the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). Comparison of Japanese native speakers with English native speakers and Chinese native speakers reveals the following trends. First, Japanese native speakers tend to overuse concessive conditionals compared to native speakers, while similar overuse is not observed in Chinese native speaker data. Second, non-nativelike uses of even if appear in contexts allowing the use of concessive conditionals in Japanese. Third, while overuse and infelicitous use of even if is observed at all proficiency levels, formal errors are restricted to learners at lower proficiency levels. These findings suggest that crosslinguistic influence does occur in the use of concessive conditionals, and that its particular realization is affected by L2 proficiency, with formal crosslinguistic influence mediated at an earlier stage than semantic cross-linguistic influence.

Identifying Key Grammatical Errors of Japanese English as a Foreign Language Learners in a Learner Corpus: Toward Focused Grammar Instruction with Data-Driven Learning

Atsushi Mizumoto,Yoichi Watari Institute for Corpus Research 2023 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.4 No.1

The number of studies on data-driven learning (DDL) has increased in recent years, and DDL's overall effectiveness as an L2 (second language) teaching methodology has been reported to be high. However, the degree of its effectiveness in grammar instruction, particularly for the goal of correcting errors in L2 writing, is still unclear. To provide guidelines for focused grammar instruction with DDL in the Japanese classroom setting, we aimed to identify the typical grammatical errors made by Japanese learners in the Cambridge Learner Corpus First Certificate in English (CLC FCE) dataset. The results revealed that three error types (nouns, articles, and prepositions) should be addressed in DDL grammar instruction for Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. In light of the findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions for future DDL research and practice are discussed.

Vocabulary Analyzer Based on CEFR-J Wordlist for Self-Reflection (VACSR) Version 2

Yukiko Ohashi,Noriaki Katagiri,Takao Oshikiri Institute for Corpus Research 2023 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.4 No.2

This paper presents a revised version of the vocabulary analyzer for self-reflection (VACSR), called VACSR v.2.0. The initial version of the VACSR automatically analyzes the occurrences and the level of vocabulary items in the transcribed texts, indicating the frequency, the unused vocabulary items, and those not belonging to either scale. However, it overlooked words with multiple parts of speech due to their identical headword representations. It also needed to provide more explanatory result tables from different corpora. VACSR v.2.0 overcomes the limitations of its predecessor. First, unlike VACSR v.1, VACSR v.2.0 distinguishes words that are different parts of speech by syntactic parsing using Stanza, an open-source Python library. It enables the categorization of the same lexical items with multiple parts of speech. Second, VACSR v.2.0 overcomes the limited clarity of VACSR v.1 by providing precise result output tables. The updated software compares the occurrence of vocabulary items included in classroom corpora for each level of the Common European Framework of Reference-Japan (CEFR-J) wordlist. A pilot study utilizing VACSR v.2.0 showed that, after converting two English classes taught by a preservice English teacher into corpora, the headwords used mostly corresponded to CEFR-J level A1. In practice, VACSR v.2.0 will promote users' reflection on their vocabulary usage and can be applied to teacher training.

Modal Auxiliary Verbs in Japanese EFL Learners' Conversation: A Corpus-based Study

Nakayama, Shusaku Institute for Corpus Research 2021 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.2 No.1

This research examines Japanese non-native speakers' (JNNS) modal auxiliary verb use from two different perspectives: frequency of use and preferences for modalities. Additionally, error analysis is carried out to identify errors in modal use common among JNNSs. Their modal use is compared to that of English native speakers within a spoken dialogue corpus which is part of the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners' English. Research findings show at a statistically significant level that when compared to native speakers, JNNSs underuse past forms of modals and infrequently convey epistemic modality, indicating the possibility that JNNSs fail to express their opinions or thoughts indirectly when needed or to convey politeness appropriately. Error analysis identifies the following three types of common errors: (1) the use of incorrect tenses of modal verb phrases, (2) the use of inflected verb forms after modals, and (3) the non-use of main verbs after modals. The first type of error is largely because JNNSs do not master how to express past meanings of modals. The second and third types of errors seem to be due to first language transfer into second language acquisition and JNNSs' overgeneralization of the subject-verb agreement rules to modals respectively.

A Study on the Diachronic Evolution of Ancient Chinese Vocabulary Based on a Large-Scale Rough Annotated Corpus

Yuan, Yiguo,Li, Bin Institute for Corpus Research 2021 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.2 No.2

This paper makes a quantitative analysis of the diachronic evolution of ancient Chinese vocabulary by constructing and counting a large-scale rough annotated corpus. The texts from Si Ku Quan Shu (a collection of Chinese ancient books) are automatically segmented to obtain ancient Chinese vocabulary with time information, which is used to the statistics on word frequency, standardized type/token ratio and proportion of monosyllabic words and dissyllabic words. Through data analysis, this study has the following four findings. Firstly, the high-frequency words in ancient Chinese are stable to a certain extent. Secondly, there is no obvious dissyllabic trend in ancient Chinese vocabulary. Moreover, the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589 AD) and Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 AD) are probably the two periods with the most abundant vocabulary in ancient Chinese. Finally, the unique words with high frequency in each dynasty are mainly official titles with real power. These findings break away from qualitative methods used in traditional researches on Chinese language history and instead uses quantitative methods to draw macroscopic conclusions from large-scale corpus.