Effectiveness Of Corpus Research Articles

The Effectiveness Data-Driven Vocabulary Learning: Hands-on Concordancing through a Pedagogical Corpus

Introduction: Although extensive studies have been carried out on the effectiveness of corpora on teaching vocabulary, the exploration of whether learners can benefit from a pedagogical corpus, particularly regarding hands-on engagement by lower-level learners, has received little attention.
 Purpose: To address this gap in the literature, this study sets out to explore the effectiveness of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) in enhancing the vocabulary acquisition of EFL students at a state university in Turkey through a pedagogical corpus.
 Method: The quasi-experimental study employed a mixed-method research design, in which both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered through vocabulary tests, student questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews. Fifty-eight low-level students with an average age of 19 served as participants. The experimental group made use of hands-on concordancing while the control group received conventional course book-based instruction to learn the target words.
 Results: The results indicate that pedagogical corpora have significant potential in facilitating vocabulary learning of low-level learners. The vocabulary tests revealed that the students who practiced with DDL outperformed the students who received traditional vocabulary instruction in both the post-test and the delayed post-test. The findings from student questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews also denoted that the participants held positive attitudes towards using concordancing to expand their vocabulary and grow aware of some aspects of words such as part of speech information, different meanings and usages, lexico-grammatical structures, and collocations.
 Conclusion: The present study provides useful implications for collection and use of a pedagogical corpus for classroom use.

Sentiment Analysis and Corpus: Cognitive Perspective and Overhead-Accuracy Tradeoff

Human logical thinking is in the form of natural language. With the development of computer science technique, it becomes easier and more convenient for natural language processing. Therefore, a variety number of natural language processing applications have emerged. Sentiment analysis is one of these novel applications, and has been applied in many areas. In Amazon.com, there are a large number of user comments and product discussions, which can help a person to decide whether to buy a product or not without asking the opinions from friends and family members. Therefore, sentiment analysis on user comments and product discussions, such as Amazon review becomes increasingly useful and important. In this paper, the effect of corpus on sentiment analysis of Amazon review dataset with the aid of support vector machine are studied. We generate eight different size datasets from Amazon review dataset filtered by different word frequency in Corpus of Contemporary American, and conduct some experiments on these eight datasets. According to the experimental result, we make some conclusion and give some suggestions to facilitate researchers to make a trade-off between accuracy and experimental cost.

Using corpora as authentic materials in the language learning classroom

The implementation of corpus linguistics (CL) to language teaching began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A corpus-based approach to language teaching is becoming an important component in language learning classrooms. This article aims to discuss the role and effectiveness of corpora as a great methodological tool, to reveal the potential of corpus instruments, and to describe the ways of integrating corpora in teaching grammar and vocabulary as authentic material. Several examples are given about how corpus material can be used for different learning activities in the classroom and possible problems that a teacher may face are considered. This article defines the importance of learning a foreign language with the use of authentic materials and familiarizes readers with several methods of application corpora in the language learning environment. Finally, the survey questionnaire was conducted among teachers of various institutions in order to identify their awareness about corpus education. Results suggest that this questionnaire may be used to presume the future prospects for the application of the Corpus-based Method in Language Learning and Teaching.

Translating official documents from French to English in Uganda

AbstractAlthough underexplored in Africa, the translation of official documents presents a revelatory context for examining translation practice and theory. Through a sociolinguistic and pragmatic lens, this study explores how translating official documents by focusing on linguistic equivalences without taking into account national institutional systems can be misleading. The argument is made that sociolinguistic variables and Grice’s pragmatic maxims are essential in enhancing translation effectiveness. A sample of 151 pairs of source and target documents dating from 2011–2017 was purposively selected. This corpus from nineteen Francophone countries covers three broad categories: Education, Legal, and General Administrative Correspondence. Nineteen translators and fourteen end-users were also interviewed regarding the translation effectiveness of corpus examples. Data is analyzed using sociolinguistic and pragmatic criteria. Finally, the analysis is positioned within the broader scholarship on translation studies to demonstrate how this approach expands our knowledge regarding effective translation.

Effectiveness of Corpus in Distinguishing Two Near-Synonymous Verbs: Damage and Destroy

This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair damage and destroy commonly misused by Chinese-speaking learners of English in terms of frequencies, genre distribution, colligation and collocation, differences in meanings and uses. It is found that damage and destroy are near-synonyms because they are relevant words and share most collocates but they are not fully intersubstitutable for certain contexts. Some words related to the human body or physical health are more collocated with damage and some such as military affairs and one’s thought or belief more with destroy. In addition, the core meaning of damage gives more emphasis on something that can be recovered but does not work well as before, while destroy offers more senses for something that no longer exists. Furthermore, the British tend to collocate the two near-synonyms with the same word to create a build-up, because destroy is endowed with a stronger degree of destruction than damage. The study ends by suggesting corpus-based analysis should be promoted in language teaching and learning to improve the accurate use of English vocabulary by language learners.

The effectiveness of corpora on Saudi EFL academic writing performance

This study reports on quantitative research that investigated the effects of the Corpus-Based Approach (CBA) as a pedagogical approach to Academic Writing Instruction in the context of Saudi Arabia. A total of fifteen female preparatory year students at an intermediate language proficiency level at King Abdulaziz University participated in the study. The study aimed at investigating the effect of applying corpora on learners’ lexico-grammatical abilities following a pretest-posttest design. Classroom intervention has been conducted and data were collected from written tasks over a period of time. The findings of the study demonstrated that the improvement of lexico-grammatical abilities among students is observed.

The Effectiveness of Corpus- Based Approach to Language Description in Creating Corpus-Based Exercises to Teach Writing Personal Statements

Using corpora in language teaching has revolutionized language research with its ‘authentic’ appeal. Corpus tools have enabled linguistic researchers and teachers to investigate actual usages and the characteristics of certain genres in order to improve syllabus design and infer more effective classroom exercises. From this perspective, this paper attempts to use corpus tools to investigate the characteristics of one of the most important requirements of university programs admissions which is the <em>personal statement</em>. Despite the immense importance of writing a personal statement in the lives of students wanting to enroll in universities, little research has been conducted on its instructions. More importantly, teaching its features to university students has been neglected although personal statements are an essential genre that should be emphasized in academic writing classes or university preparation courses. The paper aims to investigate if compiling a corpus of personal statements can lead to creating an effective corpus-based activities to be taught in teaching writing a personal statement. Then the paper attempts to evaluate the pedagogical implications of using corpus-based activities and criticized the weaknesses and strengths of corpora as a resource in language teaching. This paper chose to focus on personal statements collected from law students due to the high demand on law colleges in Saudi Arabia and the difficulty of admission requirements. This study used Sketch Engine® to complie a corpus of sixty-seven personal statement with a total word count of 50, 691, then analysed the lexio-grammatical features. The results were used to create corpus-based excersises to be taught in writing courses teaching personal statements.