Corpora: corpus linguistics course

[geoffrey.williams]

Dear Brigitte,

As promised this is a lengthier reply.

I teach a course in corpus linguistics in Nantes for students following the
licence Sciences du Langage programme. These are studying general
linguistics and will have had a course in English applied linguistics taught
by myself in the first semester. I use the latter to give them the necessary
background to contextualism. The CL course is optional in the second
semester and consists of 12 2hour blocks in a computer room.

I find that these students need a rapid hands-on approach whilst being given
some background to humanities computing. The level of computer knowledge is
highly variable, often nil, so it is necessary to be clear as to the
difference between a Word doc and a text file as they do not always see the
difference. This is all done through a mixture of self discovery and
teaching. Like Tony I do not use linux, much as I would like to, as it is
not readily available to these students. I quickly get onto text and use the
concordancer generously provided free by Darmstadt, Wincord at
http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/sprachlit/wconcord.htm . This runs under
Windows and does all the basic tasks needed in discovering language in
context. I show them WordSmith as this is the best, but the fac is too
stingy to buy anything.
I do not go into POS tagging due to lack of time, but concentrate on what a
concordancer can show when working on plain text. Once they have seen a
concordancer at work I go into more detail as to what constiututes a corpus
etc.
For background reading I recommend:
Tognini Bonelli, E. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: John
Benjamin.
PARTINGTON A. 1998. Patterns and Meanings, Amsterdam : John Benjamin's
Kennedy G. 1998. An introduction to Corpus Linguistics. Longman
and of course
SINCLAIR J. McH., 1991 Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Hope this helps

Geoffrey

PS Thought of coming to the Journées Linguistique de Corpus in Lorient
(http://www.univ-ubs.fr/crellic). It is an opportunity to exchange ideas
with other colleagues working on corpus linguistics in France.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Beatrice Vautherin" <beatrice.vautherin at wanadoo.fr>
To: <corpora at hd.uib.no>
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2002 5:41 PM
Subject: Corpora: corpus linguistics course


Dear list members,
I am seeking advice on the best way to organize a corpus linguistics course
in my English department. Starting in february 2003, 2 hours every other
week for 12 to 13 weeks (that is our second semester) so about twelve hours
altogether. I can have a computer room with 10-12 PCs.
I would like to know what corpora and what tools to buy (my BNC-World
failed to install and I sent the CDs back). Of course the less money I ask
for, the happier my head of department will be. Still I want the students
to have hands-on sessions with software that runs smoothly so as not to put
them off corpus linguistics for ever. They are second-year students in
France (Paris-Sorbonne Nouvelle) studying for a degree in English.
Thanks for your help. I will post a summary of the numerous replies I
receive.
Beatrice Vautherin


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Université Paris 3-SORBONNE NOUVELLE
Institut du Monde Anglophone
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Tel Centre Censier et boîte vocale 33 (0)1 45 87 48 12
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