Challenges of Using Corpora in Language Teaching and Learning

Shinwoong Lee 경희대학교 언어정보연구소 2011 언어연구 Vol.28 No.1

A number of advantages of using corpora in language teaching and learning have been identified by many corpus linguists and thereby its implementation into the language classroom has been highly recommended. However, the challenges and limitations of the use of corpora have not been extensively discussed, and without critically examining the use of corpora in language pedagogy it seems premature to urge teachers to use them in their classroom. In this vein, the purpose of the current paper is to provide a critical evaluation on the use of corpora in language teaching and learning and provide implications for their use in secondary school in Korea. It is argued that without a pedagogical mediation of corpora and resolving some practical problems, the pedagogical potentials of corpora may not be realized. It is also suggested that the integration of corpora into secondary school can be fostered by providing: (a) pedagogically relevant, level-specific corpora; (b) a Korean secondary learner corpus that can show the learners’ common problems; (c) an online database of corpus-based resources; and (d) a corpus workshop for pre- and in-service teachers. It is concluded that the appropriate and effective use of corpora in the classroom is partly a technical issue, but primarily a pedagogical one. If the use of corpora in the classroom is not extensively discussed and researched to develop a pedagogical blueprint for the integration, the expected pedagogical outcomes that a number of corpus linguists simply expected may not accrue to learners and teachers.

Challenges of Using Corpora in Language Teaching and Learning: Implications for Secondary Education

이신웅 경희대학교 언어정보연구소 2011 언어연구 Vol.28 No.1

A number of advantages of using corpora in language teaching and learning have been identified by many corpus linguists and thereby its implementation into the language classroom has been highly recommended. However, the challenges and limitations of the use of corpora have not been extensively discussed, and without critically examining the use of corpora in language pedagogy it seems premature to urge teachers to use them in their classroom. In this vein, the purpose of the current paper is to provide a critical evaluation on the use of corpora in language teaching and learning and provide implications for their use in secondary school in Korea. It is argued that without a pedagogical mediation of corpora and resolving some practical problems, the pedagogical potentials of corpora may not be realized. It is also suggested that the integration of corpora into secondary school can be fostered by providing: (a) pedagogically relevant, level-specific corpora; (b) a Korean secondary learner corpus that can show the learners’ common problems; (c) an online database of corpus-based resources; and (d) a corpus workshop for pre- and in-service teachers. It is concluded that the appropriate and effective use of corpora in the classroom is partly a technical issue, but primarily a pedagogical one. If the use of corpora in the classroom is not extensively discussed and researched to develop a pedagogical blueprint for the integration, the expected pedagogical outcomes that a number of corpus linguists simply expected may not accrue to learners and teachers.

Postsecondary EFL students’ evaluations of corpora with regard to English writing

장지연 서울대학교 교육종합연구원 2010 The SNU Journal of Education Research Vol.19 No.-

Recently, as a corpus, which has been mainly used for linguistic analysis, is emerging as an innovative tool in language learning, a growing body of research has paid attention to the efficacy of corpus use from educational perspectives. Given that corpus use for pedagogical purposes entails autonomous and independent learning of language learners, it is important to uncover how corpus users evaluate it based on their own experience. While most of the previous studies were conducted in the ESL settings, the present study sets out to examine postsecondary Korean students’ opinions of general and specialized corpora with regard to their own English study and writing in the EFL setting. The questionnaires which twenty-eight students of two corpus workshops submitted were analyzed in terms of their evaluations of corpora as well as their prior writing experience, reference use, and attitudes towards English study and writing. The results show that the respondents, being dissatisfied with their English skills, were eager to increase their overall English skills and English writing skills. During English writing, they usually used two to three language references including bilingual dictionaries followed by monolingual dictionaries and Internet search engines. The results also prove that the respondents regarded corpora as helpful language references and that they would use them and recommend them to other students. The respondents, however, expressed disparate attitudes towards specialized corpora. In general, corpora were considered more appropriate to the intermediate and advanced levels of students in terms of language proficiency and academic experience. Using corpora for pedagogical purposes merits further research to validate its efficacy and investigate the possibility of its application in Korea.

Corpus Pedagogy: Analyzing Corpus Use in the Classroom and EFL Business Student Attitudes towards Corpora

John O'Donoghue,Chae Kwan Jung 팬코리아영어교육학회(구 영남영어교육학회) 2013 영어교육연구 Vol.25 No.3

For over thirty years corpus linguists have been discussing the applicability of corpora to language teaching. While their use in compiling dictionaries and shaping teaching materials has been promoted and celebrated, using corpora directly in the classroom has been propagated by some but rejected, or even ignored, by many. Those who have conducted research into such direct use of corpora have tended to select postgraduate students who have an intrinsic interest in language or linguistics. The results of such research have invariably been rather positive. This study aims to examine the application of one corpus at undergraduate level with students whose focus is on the more general area of business and establish whether similarly positive results are to be observed. The results of which indicate that the majority of participants benefited from the experience and valued their corpus activity. There was, however, some criticism concerning navigating the British National Corpus (BNC) and the time-consuming nature of corpus work. The diverse nature of students' performances reflects the wide range of student responses to engaging with corpus. The student' attitudes indicate that an active guiding role by the teacher may significantly improve the quality of such learners' involvement with corpora.

Learner Corpora Investigation of English Article Production by Korean EFL Learners

Daria Soon-Young Seog 현대문법학회 2021 현대문법연구 Vol.110 No.-

The current study expands on the previous corpus-based study which investigated the use of English articles by adult advanced proficiency Korean EFL learners by comparing a learner corpus and a native speaker corpus. The present paper reports on a follow-up investigation of the Korean EFL learners’ use of English articles: the, a(n), and Ø (the zero or null article) using a young learner corpus, the KNU English Learner Corpus (KELC), and two recently added subcorpora of KNU English as a Foreign Language Corpus (KEFLC), the KNU junior high school learner corpus (KJHSC) and the KNU high school learner corpus (KHSC). Comparison analyses were conducted among the learner corpora consisting of data from different grade level groups of Korean EFL learners and between the learner corpora and the native speaker corpus, COCA. Results show that the high occurrence frequency of the Ø article in the early stages of the article acquisition process is evidence of L1 transfer. Furthermore, the L2 article usage hierarchies found for each of the different grade level learner corpora exhibited overgeneralization of the Ø article or omission or failure to provide articles that resulted in high occurrence frequencies of the Ø article in all grade level learner corpora except the university level KNU Student English Learner Corpus-Written (KSELC-W). The L2 article usage hierarchy for KSELC-W revealed existence of the-flooding. Finally, the findings from the current study indicate that corpus-based studies can provide insight into interlanguage developmental processes and support previous literature with evidence from large data-based investigations.

2016년 영국 신문의 브렉시트(Brexit) 관련 텍스트에 관한 코퍼스 언어학적 분석

김철규 한국현대언어학회 2017 언어연구 Vol.33 No.1

This paper describes an analysis of 2 million word corpora from 2016 British newspaper texts which refer to the issue of Brexit. The impetus of the research is to describe such social change as Brexit with linguistic terms, especially corpora and their keywords. Two corpora were built: Corpus A was made from the news articles before the Brexit referendum and Corpus B from the articles after the referendum. Both corpora were compared to BNC for finding out any similarity between Corpora A and B, and then compared to each other for clarifying any difference between them. The analysis showed that the keywords from both the corpora commonly contained major politicians and events relevant to the issue of Brexit. It also showed that the change in political situations around the referendum was well reflected in the keywords of both the corpora. Finally, the contents of the corpora were speculated through categorizing the keywords using Wmatrix.

2016년 영국 신문의 브렉시트(Brexit) 관련 텍스트에 관한 코퍼스 언어학적 분석

김철규 ( Kim Chul-kyu ) 한국현대언어학회 2017 언어연구 Vol.33 No.1

This paper describes an analysis of 2 million word corpora taken from British newspapers in 2016, which refer to the issue of Brexit. The impetus of the research is to describe such social change as Brexit in linguistic terms, especially corpora and their keywords. Two corpora were built: Corpus A was compiled from news articles before the Brexit referendum, and Corpus B from articles after the referendum. Both corpora were compared to British Natinal Corpus (BNC) to identify any similarities between Corpora A and B, and were then compared to each other in order to identify differences between them. The analysis showed that the keywords from both the corpora typically contained names of major politicians and events relevant to the issue of Brexit. It also showed that changes in the political situation, around the time of the referendum, were well reflected in the keywords of both the corpora. Finally, the contents of the corpora were predicted through categorizing the keywords using Wmatrix. (Kyungsung University)

용례색인 말뭉치를 활용한 영어 어휘 의미론 교육

조의연(Cho Euiyon) 담화·인지언어학회 2006 담화와 인지 Vol.13 No.3

Concordancing corpora have been utilized not only in foreign language teaching but also in the studies of lexical semantics and syntax (Johns 1991, Aston 2001, Partington 2001, and Stubbs 2004 to name a few). But there is relatively little on how corpora can be incorporated in teaching classes in linguistics. This paper reports on my experience in using concordancing corpora in teaching a college English lexical semantic class. It discusses how learners can be guided in carrying out some lexical semantic tasks based on concordancing corpora. It shows that students play the role of a novice language researcher and language learner when performing concordancing corpora-based lexical semantics tasks. As a result of using computer-loaded concordancing corpora, I have found that students get more autonomous in extracting information from the corpora in the absence of a teacher and they are better trained as corpus researchers.

The advantages and challenges of “big data”: Insights from the 14 billion word iWeb corpus

Mark Davies,Jong-Bok Kim 경희대학교 언어정보연구소 2019 언어연구 Vol.36 No.1

The iWeb corpus contains nearly 14 billion words from 22 million web pages, and it has been designed in a way that allows users to quickly and easily create “Virtual Corpora”, in order to focus on websites that are related to their areas of interest. The data from this very large corpus provides very detailed information on syntactic, morphological, lexical, and semantic phenomena, in ways that would never be possible with a small 100 million or 500 million word corpus. In addition, the corpus provides a number of features that are not available with other large corpora, such as the ability to perform advanced searches of the top 60,000 words in the corpus, and to see a wealth of information on each of these words – definitions, links to images and audio, translations, detailed frequency information, related topics, collocates, word clusters, re-sortable concordance lines, and much more. Finally, we discuss the challenges of large corpora, and how the corpus architecture that is used for iWeb has uniquely been designed to address these challenges.

An Action Research-based Case Study on the Application of Corpora to the Korean-into-English Translation Classroom with Revision as a Complementary Resource

남원준 한국번역학회 2007 번역학연구 Vol.8 No.1

An Action Research-based Case Study on the Application of Corpora to the Korean-into-English Translation Classroom with Revision as a Complementary Resource Nam, Wonjun(Hankuk University of Foreign Studies) The present action research-based case study explores the possibility of employing corpora and the complementary resource of revision (professional revisers revising the work of students) as translation aids in the postgraduate Korean-into-English translation classroom.In accordance with Kemmis & McTaggart's division of action research into "four component parts: planning, acting, observing, and reflecting,"(recited from Timothy Stewart 81) the study initially identifies the gap that persists between the lecturer and students in the classroom in its "planning" stage, as a result of which corpora are chosen as translation aids to be applied. In the following "acting" stage, an in-class translation experiment is carried out in which two sets of corpora are compiled and offered to students at the GSIT, HUFS. And in the ensuing "observing" stage, two hypotheses are confirmed. Then, in the "reflecting" stage, investigation reveals that when corpora alone does not deliver the desired results, revision by professional revisers is an appropriate complement to corpora.Against this backdrop, an "ideal" postgraduate Korean-into-English translation classroom will involve a process through which i) corpora elevate the students' ability in better finding solutions for translating metaphors, idioms and culture-specific items; ii) the reviser revises the works done by students; and iii) the Korean lecturer oversees the entire process in order to analyze and suggest appropriate translation strategies.