Summary Week7

October 15th, 2012(Week7)

1) Perez-Paredes (2011)

             Much of the research into language learners’ use of corpus resources has been done through indirect observation methodologies, like questionnaires or self-reports, failing to give an account of students’ actual interaction with the resources (Perez-Paredes, 2011). Unlike those previous researches, this research was done on learners’ direct use of corpora as L2 learning device. The participants were two EFL groups of second year university students: one without any corpus consultation guidance (control group), the other with guidance (experimental group). They completed two focus-on-form tasks dealing with the use of emphatic structures. The experiment was conducted over a week and took three 60 min sessions. The data collection tool was Fiddler logs. Five parameters were used to analyze learner behavior - their interaction with corpus resources: (1) number of browser events launched, (2)number of different websites visited, (3)activities completed, (4)number of BNC searches, (5)number of words per search. As a whole, the behavior of the two groups didn’t show big differences. Among the results, the distribution of the number of activities completed in the two groups did not differ significantly, which means that extra time for guided-consultation doesn’t damage productivity. So in this respect, the role of corpus consultation guidance should be considered.

2) Reinhardt (2010)

             This article is about a review on previous research on corpus-based techniques and the author’s (Reinhardt) view on corpus linguistics. He focused on the pedagogical application of corpus-based theory and methodologies, and explored possible reasons why current L2 teaching practices do not reflect the knowledge gained through corpus linguistics. He outlined early debates and discussions on corpus findings about the nature of language and learning. Then, he discussed corpus-informed L2 pedagogy, and concluded this article with ideas on how to enhance the impact of corpus linguistics on L2 teaching in the future. Among some assertions of linguists he referred to, the opinion of Gavioli (1997) and Gabel (2001) on DDL(data-driven-learning) is quite interesting. They argued that DDL can foster the learners’ analytical capacities on the point that corpus-informed approaches like DDL necessarily involve training the students to develop a researcher mindset.

3) Compare and Contrast

              The first article, Perez-Paredes (2011) showed results of experiment on actual learner interaction with corpus-based resources, whereas the latter, Reinhardt (2010) is about author’s findings and views on the previous researches done on corpus-informed L2 pedagogy. Both articles reviewed the previous researches on learners’ using corpus-based resources. Most of the early researches used indirect observational method rather than direct analysis on learner behavior of using corpus as resources. So, those studies just scratched the surface of corpus-based L2 pedagogy.

    

- Clarification question

 When analyzing the 5 parameters, Mann-Whitney test was used. What is this?

- Application question

 Even after reading through both articles, I am afraid that I don’t fully get the concept of ‘concordancing. How do I apply this to my teaching method? I definitely need to learn more in class.