Learner Corpus Research Articles

Automated assessment of learner text complexity

Abstract EFL methodology has always recognized the importance of giving student learners of foreign languages regular and quick feedback on student production, both written and oral. The presented paper describes the decisions taken during the development of an application to measure text complexity, and shows how the results achieved with this application were translated into feedback related to the author’s language proficiency. Along with some standard text complexity features, this tool takes into account those that are significant for Russian learners of English. The application provides students with the statistics of the relevant linguistic features of the text in comparison with texts of the learner essays that were considered the top and the bottom levels in the learner corpus. The paper also points out what text features are especially relevant for the assessment of the essays written in English by Russian students. The choice was made possible after the analysis of 3440 texts from Russian Error-Annotated English Learner Corpus, and after applying methods of machine learning and statistical analysis to predict the grade that could be received for the essay.

Syntactic Complexity of EFL Learners’ Casual Conversation, Monologue, and Writing

This paper aims to investigate how syntactic complexity differs depending on production modes. To this end, we examined a learner corpus obtained from undergraduate students, which comprises casual conversations, monologues, and writings. The syntactic complexity of each mode was measured by an automatic syntactic complexity analyser (TAASSC). The results are as follows: a) both the monologue and writing modes elicited greater syntactic complexity than conversation. However, syntactic complexity was not significantly different between monologues and writings except for Complex Nominals per Clause; b) among the three modes, syntactic complexity (i.e., Mean Length of Sentences and Complex Nominals per T-unit) in conversation was the best indicator of the L2 proficiency. Different cognitive or executive processes underlying the modes may have affected the complexity use. This paper suggests pedagogical implications that a monologue-like manner, such as presenting motivating topics, may enhance the use of complex structures in L2 conversations. (Incheon National University)

Exploring Reusability and Reproducibility for a Research Infrastructure for L1 and L2 Learner Corpora

Up until today research in various educational and linguistic domains such as learner corpus research, writing research, or second language acquisition has produced a substantial amount of research data in the form of L1 and L2 learner corpora. However, the multitude of individual solutions combined with domain-inherent obstacles in data sharing have so far hampered comparability, reusability and reproducibility of data and research results. In this article, we present work in creating a digital infrastructure for L1 and L2 learner corpora and populating it with data collected in the past. We embed our infrastructure efforts in the broader field of infrastructures for scientific research, drawing from technical solutions and frameworks from research data management, among which the FAIR guiding principles for data stewardship. We share our experiences from integrating some L1 and L2 learner corpora from concluded projects into the infrastructure while trying to ensure compliance with the FAIR principles and the standards we established for reproducibility, discussing how far research data that has been collected in the past can be made comparable, reusable and reproducible. Our results show that some basic needs for providing comparable and reusable data are covered by existing general infrastructure solutions and can be exploited for domain-specific infrastructures such as the one presented in this article. Other aspects need genuinely domain-driven approaches. The solutions found for the corpora in the presented infrastructure can only be a preliminary attempt, and further community involvement would be needed to provide templates and models acknowledged and promoted by the community. Furthermore, forward-looking data management would be needed starting from the beginning of new corpus creation projects to ensure that all requirements for FAIR data can be met.

Öğrenen Derlemlerinin Dil Öğretiminde Kullanımı Üzerine Kuramsal Tartışmalar

Derlem, belli bir dili veya dil değişkesini temsil edebilmek amacıyla, yazılı ve/veya sözlü dil kullanımlarını dengeli ve katmanlı örnekleme yoluyla derleyip temel dilbilimsel çözümlemelerle birlikte elektronik ortamlarda sunan kaynaklardır. Bu çalışmanın amacı, öğrenen derlemlerinin dil öğretiminde kullanımı üzerine farklı yaklaşımları incelemek ve mevcut öğrenen derlemlerini çeşitli ölçütler bakımından değerlendirerek araştırmacılara kuramsal bir çerçeve sunmaktır. Ayrıca dil öğretiminde dünyada uzun yıllardır yararlanılan öğrenen derlemlerinden Türkçe öğretiminde de yararlanılması için bir farkındalık oluşturmaktır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda derlem, derlem dil bilimi, derlem türleri ve öğrenen derlemleriyle ilgili alan yazın taraması yapılmış, öğrenen derlemlerinin dil öğretiminin hangi aşamasında nasıl kullanıldığıyla ilgili saptamalar ortaya konulmuştur. Öğrenen derlemlerinin genellikle aradil çözümlemelerinde, derslerde kullanılacak ders kitabı, dil bilgisi kitabı, sözlük gibi kaynakların hazırlanmasında, dil öğrenenlerin hedef dilin kullanım örneklerini inceleme çalışmalarında, öğretimin müfredat oluşturma ve ölçme-değerlendirme aşamalarında, özel amaçlı dil öğretimi ve akademik amaçlı dil öğretimi çalışmalarında kullanıldığı sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.

Cross-linguistic influence on the use of L2 collocations: the case of Vietnamese learners

AbstractUsing collocation is a key part of second language ability (Granger, Sylviane. 2018. Formulaic sequences in learner corpora: Collocations and lexical bundles. In Anna Siyanova-Chanturia & Ana Pellicer-Sanchez (eds.),Understanding formulaic language: A second language acquisition perspective, 228–247. New York: Routledge; Nattinger, James R. & Jeamette S. DeCarrico. 1992.Lexical phrases and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Nesselhauf, Nadja. 2004.Collocations in a learner corpus. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.; Pawley, Andrew & Frances H. Syder. 1983. Two puzzles for linguistics: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In Jack Richards & Richard W. Schmidt (eds.),Language and communication, 191–228. London: Longman). Researchers often hypothesize that the influence of the first language is an important factor in the production and understanding of unconventional collocations (Huang, Li-Shi. 2001. Knowledge of English collocations: An analysis of Taiwanese EFL learners.Paper presented at the Texas Foreign Languguage Education Conference, Texas; Laufer, Bhatia & Tina Waldman. 2011. Verb-noun collocations in second language writing: A corpus analysis of learners’ English.Language Learning61(2). 647–672.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2010.00621.x; Phoocharoensil, Supakorn. 2013. Cross-linguistic influence: Its impact on L2 English collocation production.English Language Teaching6(1). 1–10) but we are only now starting to understand this. The present study provides a robust investigation of cross-linguistic influences by exploring how Vietnamese influenced Vietnamese learners’ use of English language verb-noun and adjective noun collocations in 104 350-word argumentative essays, using a framework derived from Jarvis, Scott. 2012. The detection-based approach: An overview. In S. Jarvis & S. A. Crossley (eds.),Approaching language transfer through text classification: Explorations in the detection-based approach, 1st ed., Vol. 64, 1–33. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, drawing on homogeneity among speakers of Vietnamese; heterogeneity between users of Vietnamese and other language; and formal and conceptual congruity between collocations learners produce in English and equivalent terms in Vietnamese. The study found that less than 10% of the collocations learners produced were unconventional and of these, 40% of collocations were influenced by the first language (L1); errors associated with incorrect use of prepositions in verb-noun collocations (e.g. the addition, omission or misuse of prepositions) are strongly L1-motivated. Learners make errors with not only incongruent collocations (collocations with no direct L1 equivalents) but also with congruent collocations (collocations with direct L1 translation).

Learning to Evaluate Through That-Clauses

The advent of technology has facilitated the study of language development and writing development in the form of learner corpora. While learner corpus studies have flourished in recent years, few consider evaluative language development. This paper reports on a study which examines the use of evaluative that-clauses, a linguistic structure that is regularly used to express evaluation in academic writing, in a longitudinal corpus of 304 argumentative essays written by a group of undergraduate students at a university in Brunei. Results suggest students' dynamic use of language resources over time, and support the findings of previous research on the use of evaluative that-clauses by undergraduate students in other contexts of learning. This study, based on an approach to treating learner language in its own right, contributes to the understanding of the nature of language development. Implications for language teaching, including a revised role for teacher feedback and the use of longitudinal learner corpora for students' learning, are considered.

A Usage-Based Study of L2 Constructional Development: Combining Learner Corpus and Experimental Data

A Usage-Based Study of L2 Constructional Development: Combining Learner Corpus and Experimental Data

One norm to rule them all? Corpus-derived norms in learner corpus research and foreign language teaching

AbstractThis paper considers the issue of the norm in the context of learner corpus research and its implications for foreign language teaching. It seeks to answer three main questions: Does learner corpus research require a native norm? What corpus-derived norms are available and how do we choose? What do we do with these norms in the classroom? The first two questions are more research-oriented, reviewing the types of reference corpora that can be used in the analysis of learner corpora, whereas the third one looks into the pedagogical use of corpus-derived norms. It is shown that, while studies in learner corpus research can dispense with a native norm, they usually rely on one, and that a wide range of native and non-native norms are available, from which choosing the most appropriate one(s) is of crucial importance. This large repertoire of corpus-derived norms is then reconsidered in view of the reality of the foreign language classroom.

A Corpus-based Comparative Study of “get-passive” Semantic Prosody

Research on semantic prosody education is playing a vital role in the process of learning English.This research is based on the LOB corpus (Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen corpus) and the IWriteBaby corpus, the core library of the IWrite Chinese English Learner Corpus. Using AntConc 3.5.7, to compare the semantic preference of the collocation words of get in the two corpora that meet the get-passive structure. Aiming to compare the semantic prosody differences between Chinese English learners and native speakers when they use the structure “get-passive”. It mainly focuses on the analysis of neutral collocation terms that have a higher frequency of co-occurrence with get and a mutual information value (I value) which is greater than or equal to 3. The research results show that Chinese English learners tend to have neutral semantic prosody when using this structure, while native speakers tend to prefer negative semantic prosody.With the combination of semantic prosody and corpus method should be attached importance to improve the level of English education.

Natural language processing for learner corpus research

Natural language processing for learner corpus research

Automatic analysis of passive constructions in Korean

AbstractThe present study aims to explore the applicability of automatic analysis to L2-Korean learner corpora, with a special focus on learners’ use of a clause-level construction. For this purpose, we investigate L1-Mandarin L2-Korean learners’ written production of two passive construction types in Korean – suffixal and periphrastic – by devising a pattern-extraction process through NLP techniques. We focus on reporting how the passive constructions are identified and extracted from learner writing automatically, given language-specific features involving the passive. A total of 72 essays were analysed by adapting an existing pipeline (developed byShin, forthcoming), with enhanced tokenisation and annotation through manual revision of the data. Results showed that our automatic pattern-finder identified more instances than manual extraction for the suffixal passive and yielded a perfect match with manual extraction for the periphrastic passive. Implications of the findings are discussed in regard to strengths and drawbacks of the automatic analysis of learner writing, with suggestions for improving currently available tools for learner corpus research in Korean.

Review of Nesselhauf (2005): Collocations in a Learner Corpus

Review of Nesselhauf (2005): Collocations in a Learner Corpus

Mot en trebank for amerikanorsk

This article presents a method for automatic assignment of syntactic dependency relations to the corpus of American Norwegian speech (CANS). Different machine learning techniques and corpora are used. Finally, an accuracy measure is computed and compared with a relatively new treebank for spoken Norwegian.

A Corpus Study of the English Suffixes -ness and -acy: Productivity, Genre, and Implications for L2 Learning

Despite substantial scholarship relating to word structure (Anderson, 2018), for English affixes the relationship between productivity, genre, and second language (L2) learning remains unclear. Analysis of the existing literature reveals that deadjectival noun suffixes (i.e., nouns derived from adjectives such as appropriacy or goodness) have been underexamined. To address this gap, we examine two rival suffixes, -acy and -ness, through the lens of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010), considering numerous factors which might condition their varying usage. Critically, corpus data in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus (Davies, 2008-) reveal the importance of considering these affixes’ productivity in relation to genre, since -acy is especially frequent in academic texts, principally within certain social sciences. The implications for learners and teachers of English as a second language are discussed, particularly higher-level learners building communicative competence in academic contexts, along with a preliminary learner corpus comparison of the two variants.

RETRACTED: Design of Russian corpus based on embedded system and cloud computing

Russian Learner Corpus (Radio Link) first corpus and foreign language learners , and there is a noticeable difference between traditional speakers. Russian Student Texts Corpus (CoRST) Language Lab is a computational and program for holes initiated by corpus. It will be a collection of Russian texts written by students of different Russian universities. Its main goal is to study language changes and mark language deviations. CoRST is provided with Metalanguage, morphology, and error specifications. Usually, an error part is marked with incorrect labels because it can be fixed in many ways. Also, corpus offers a search by spelling and construction compounds for two possible descriptive factors. Cost growth prospects need two calculations and methods—CoRST and legal and comparative statistical analysis of NRC language events. The define predictive methods for problem formulation and adjustment of the calculation model. The purpose of this work is to explain the answer to this problem. Combine sophisticated computing and computing prototype strategies to provide a flexible execution framework for cloud embedded or mobile devices as a test; an accreditation system developed. Cloud computing allows for advantages such as smooth performance, shortened development time, simpler embedded systems, and is considered impossible. Cloud computing functionality and performance is a collection of potential hardware and software remote server groups Centralized data storage and transfer Data services Online access to prediction resources.

Analysis of Subject-Verb Agreement Errors in Third Person Singular Verb Forms by Spanish University Students: A Corpus-Based Study

This study is aimed at analyzing subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors with third person singular lexical verbs in the Present Simple by Spanish higher-education students in a computerized learner corpus from Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR). The corpus is composed of 155 participants and 246 writing samples and it consists of the students’ spontaneous writings in response to a compulsory online forum from the nonlinguistic subject, ICT Tools Applied to the Learning of English, which is included in the curriculum of the Degree in Early Years Education. The SVA errors found in the corpus were classified according to Dulay, Burt and Krashen’s (1982) Surface Strategy Taxonomy, which groups language errors into four different types: omission, addition, misformation and misordering. The results show that the most frequent type of error made by the students is misformation, followed by misordering and by addition, which account for almost 95% of the total number of errors, whereas omission is the least frequent type of error, accounting for only 5% of all the errors. At the same time, the analysis indicates that the errors produced by the students are mainly intralingual, reflecting an inadequate or incomplete learning of the target language, and also interlingual since some errors committed by the learners are related to native language (NL) transfer. These results suggest some pedagogical implications for the teaching and learning of SVA rules which are also included in the paper.

The compilation of a developmental spoken English corpus of Turkish EFL learners

Although compiling a spoken learner corpus is not a recent enterprise, the number of developmental learner spoken corpora in the field of corpus linguistics is not satisfactory. This report describes the compilation of the Yeditepe Spoken Corpus of Learner English (YESCOLE), a 119,787-word corpus of Turkish students’ spoken English at tertiary level. YESCOLE was compiled to generate a developmental corpus of spoken interlanguage by collecting samples from learners of different English proficiency levels at regular short intervals over seven months. In order to shed light on the laborious methodology of compiling the developmental spoken learner corpus, this paper elucidates the steps taken to build YESCOLE and discusses its potential benefits for research and instructional purposes.

A Descriptive Study of Prepositional Errors in Japanese Learner Corpus of English:

A Descriptive Study of Prepositional Errors in Japanese Learner Corpus of English:

The Process Corpus of English in Education: Going beyond the written text

The Process Corpus of English in Education (PROCEED) is a learner corpus of English which, in addition to written texts, consists of data that make the writing process visible in the form of keystroke log files and screencast videos. It comes with rich metadata about each learner, among which indices of exposure to the target language and cognitive measures such as working memory or fluid intelligence. It also includes an L1 component which is made up of similar data produced by the learners in their mother tongue. PROCEED opens new perspectives in the study of learner writing, by going beyond the written product. It makes it possible to investigate aspects such as writing fluency, use of online resources, cognitive phenomena like automaticity and avoidance, or theoretical modelling of the writing process. It also has applications for teaching, e.g. by showing students screencast video clips from the corpus illustrating effective writing strategies, as well as for testing, e.g. by establishing a corpus-derived standard of writing fluency for learners at a certain proficiency level.

Linking or delinking of ideas?

AbstractThis paper explores the use of adversative Linking Adverbials (LAs) in the academic writing of advanced English Foreign Language (EFL) learners with different linguistic backgrounds. The learner corpus used in this study consists of 50 argumentative essays which are contrasted with a native corpus: the American university students’ corpus (LOCNESS).Liu’s (2008)comprehensive list of adversative LAs has been used for the analysis. Findings reveal that both non-native (NNS) and native speakers of English (NS) use similar types of adversative LAs, but NNS place them regularly in sentence- and sometimes in paragraph-initial position, which often results in punctuation issues and misuse. A total of 9 LAs were found to be overused (e.g.,nevertheless) and underused (e.g.,actually) by NNS. The analysis performed according to L1 has yielded unexpected results in terms of preference, frequency, and placement of adversative LAs. The so-called ‘teaching effect’ is considered one of the main factors influencing the learners’ choices.