Shona Whyte has written three excellent summary-and-reaction pieces about plenaries at the recent 13th Teaching and Language Corpora conference held at Cambridge University.
The first plenary is from Susan Hunston and covers Pattern Grammar.
The second is from Anne O’Keeffe and is about the interface between DDL and SLA.
The third, from Alex Boulton, provides an overview of the state of DDL research.
Slides for all of them, a fourth plenary by Costas Gabrielatos, and several other presentations can be found in the TaLC Conference Program.
The audio did not turn out very well 😦 . Oh well. If you have any questions or would like me to explain the flow/transition between some of the slides, please get in touch. I will be submitting a paper for the conference proceedings, so that should help clarify anything that is not terribly clear just from reading the slides.
This is my presentation at JALT PanSIG on May, 19th. I will be audio recording myself as well, and if the quality is decent, I will post the audio later.
The BYU Corpora bank, which of course includes COCA, has added a new, 14 billion word corpus. I haven’t looked at it in detail yet, but it seems to have a lot of useful new search features. There is an overview here: https://corpus.byu.edu/iweb/help/iweb_overview.pdf.
I may update this note later after I’ve played with the interface a bit more.
Focusing only on the most robust results (i.e., MVs with at least 10 unique samples in both P/P and C/E designs), 70% had large effects, 25% medium, and only 5% small or negligible. The most consistent large effects showed that DDL is perhaps most appropriate in foreign language contexts for undergraduates as much as graduates, for intermediate levels as much as advanced, for general as much as specific/academic purposes, for local as much as large corpora, for hands-on concordancing as much as for paper-based exploration, for learning as much as reference, and particularly for vocabulary and lexicogrammar. Many of these findings go against common perceptions, and the elements missing from the list (e.g., skills or other language areas) are for the most part missing because there is as yet insufficient research rather than because research evidence is against them.
[O]ur meta-analysis showed a medium-sized effect on L2 vocabulary learning, with the greatest benefits for promoting in-depth knowledge to learners who have at least intermediate L2 proficiency. Corpus use was also more effective when the concordance lines were purposely selected and provided and when learning materials were given along with hands-on corpus-use opportunities. Moreover, we found that corpus use is still effective even without prior training and remains effective regardless of the corpus type or the length of the intervention.
The details of both papers are worth digging into, especially if one is statistically-minded. Furthermore, Boulton & Cobb make a number of recommendations for what kinds of studies and data could benefit the field in the future, while Lee, Warschauer, & Lee also mention that certain types of data/studies could help with the problem of small-sample sizes in future meta-analyses. In other words, if you do or are interested in doing DDL or corpus-use research, these papers point out gaps where research could be done and would be useful.
So the gist is that both papers are excellent contributions to understanding the effects of DDL and moderating influences, and they point to future research needs.
Boulton, A., & Cobb, T. (2017). Corpus Use in Language Learning: A Meta‐Analysis. Language Learning, 67(2), 348-393.
Lee, H., Warschauer, M., & Lee, J.H. (2018). The Effects of Corpus Use on Second Language Vocabulary Learning: A Multilevel Meta-analysis. Applied Linguistics.
A multilingual (CfP in 5 languages) conference on DDL will be held on September 27-28 in Torino, Italy. The conference website is available here, and the CfP can be downloaded from this page.
Researchers and teachers are invited to submit proposals discussing theoretical implications and practical applications of DDL in foreign language classes and in CLIL contexts.
Since one of the aims of the Conference is to reach out to the teachers in primary and secondary education, participants are also invited to deliver practical workshops and/or share their experience and examples of good practices with the other participants.
Please follow the links above for details about submissions, registration, and other conference matters.
Me and I, I and Me: Frequency effects?
Russ Mayne wrote an interesting post a few days ago on the constructions “my wife and I” and “me and my wife”. I fully agree with him regarding the ‘correctness’ of either construction and the main thrust of his post, but I did have a thought about one very specific part of his post.
English sentences usually start with subjects. so in ‘I love you’, I is the subject. If it were the object it would change to ‘me’ such as ‘you love me’. The sentence ‘me and my wife went to the party’ seems to flaunt this rule because ‘me’ is in the subject position and so it should be I.
The problem with this argument is, were it true, the sentence ‘I and my wife went to the party’ would be a perfectly proper sentence, after all, the subject is properly ‘I’. However, ‘I and my wife’ sounds a bit off to me. So is something else is going on here?
McWhorter makes the rather bold claim that ‘me’, not ‘I’ is in fact English’s subject pronoun and that I is a rather special word that is only used when there is only one subject before the verb. Therefore ‘I went to the party’ sounds OK, and ‘me and the lads went to the party’ sounds OK, but ‘I and the lads went to the party’ doesn’t sound right because there is more than one subject. I’d never heard this argument before but I’d welcome some disconfirming evidence.
I’m not going to claim that I have disconfirming evidence, but I would like to express my skepticism and suggest that frequency effects are playing a large role (there’s also an element in play here that pronouns are more slippery than many people realize).
I also find that the construction “I and my wife” sounds a bit off. However, I doubt the notion of “I is a rather special word that is only used when there is only one subject before the verb”. Rather, because I encounter “me” used in these constructions much more frequently than “I”, that is the construction that sounds right to me.
Looking at these lines, “me and my wife” is more frequent than “I and my wife”, though only a relatively small sample was found (7:3). The open “me and my *” was more frequent than “I and my *”. In this case the ratio is 244:83. To me, those 83 occurrences of “I and my *” are interesting. The construction is in use. Is the sample large enough (are enough people using it) to assume these aren’t simply mistakes or production errors? I think for the moment it is. Presumably, the people using the construction don’t find anything about it that sounds wrong, or feel a need to stop and rephrase. And, as odd as it sounds to me, I don’t really think there is anything wrong with it.
Your sense of English as a whole is really an abstract combination of all of the idiolects that you’ve experienced over the course of your life, especially at a young and formative age. The conversations you’ve had, the books you’ve read, the television you’ve watched: all of these give you a sense of what exists out there as possible variants on the English language. The elements that you hear more commonly, or the features that you prefer for whatever reason, are the ones you latch onto as prototypical.
I think that my preference for “me and my *” over “I and my *” isn’t rooted in anything inherent about the subjective/objective properties of I/me, but stems from the frequency of my encounters (including my own production) with the construction(s). In other words, I doubt that there is a binary I=sub. pronoun and me=obj. pronoun (or vice versa) quality at work here, but that either pronoun can be sub/obj depending on context, and that my idiolect (more specifically for the matter at hand, my internal grammar about which construction is preferred in certain situations) is influenced, if not driven, by frequency effects of usage.
In summary: I prefer “me and my *”. But the corpus data shows that some other people use “I and my *”. I think that both are grammatical and that the preference for one or the other is largely a product of frequency effects on the idiolect. That is, frequency of exposure affects whether something ‘sounds right’.
If you work with or read about corpora, you are probably familiar with Sketch Engine. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is described on its own website as “the ultimate corpus tool”, and that’s maybe not an exaggeration. You can do a ton of cool stuff with it. Sketch Engine also provides access to hundreds of ready-to-use corpora in close to a hundred languages.
However, it requires a subscription (although a 30-day trial is available for starters). This puts some people off from it; after all, there are a lot of free resources out there.
What some people may not realize, though, is that there are some “open corpora” on Sketch Engine that can be explored (with all of Sketch Engine’s features) without registration.
What inspired me to write this post is the presence in the list of open corpora of the EcoLexicon English Corpus, which was made available earlier this year.
The EcoLexicon is an environmental knowledge base and tool developed at the University of Granada. It is described as a knowledge base for “language specialists, domain experts, and the general public. Its representations are designed to help translators, technical writers, and environmental experts who need to access and better understand specialized environmental concepts with a view to writing or translating specialized and semi-specialized texts” (San Martín et al., 2017, p. 97).
The EcoLexicon English Corpus is a collection of English texts used in the EcoLexicon project. Searches can be limited according to domain of environmental studies, type of intended user of the text, geographical variety of English, country of publication, year of publication (1973-2016), publication genre, and who edited the text.
From an ELT-perspective, perhaps certain ESP-settings are the most obvious place for such a corpus to be useful. But really I’m just happy such a corpus has been made available to anyone who wants to explore language concerning environmental studies, policies, and communication.
The other open corpora are valuable too! And can let you try out Sketch Engine without needing to commit to anything or even registering.