[Corpora-List] Data-Driven Learning materials

[mi.barlow at auckland.ac.nz]

This exchange about DDL is coming two or three weeks earlier than I would have wished.  I have created the corpusLAB.com site to address some of the issues raised by Martin and others. The main aim is to encourage the use of corpus-based language learning materials and the site contains fairly traditional exercise authoring capabilities, but I have added a Categorise exercise, where students drag and drop “members” onto the appropriate “category”, as one kind of DDL exercise.  The exercises are located under different (potentially modifiable) genres: Academic English, English for Tourism, etc. The site is functional but I am having some more programming done to make some changes to the display and allow for some automatic exercise generation. Once that is finished, I will add a guide and samples of exercises, some with screen shots of concordances lines etc. My main aim, however, is to produce a resource for others to develop and I am open any suggestions regarding the use of the corpuslab site to host materials or exercises.

The second part of the site involves Resources. There is a simple concordancer for my spoken American corpus and I will add other text analysis components as time and my programming abilities allow.  The main idea behind the Resources section is to allow sharing (uploading/downloading) of wordlists, collocation lists, worksheets etc. Again these are organised by genre. (I see though that the latest programmer/designer introduced a bug and that the resources list is not displaying correctly at the moment.)

There are prototype variants of the site at grammar.corpuslab.com (where the topics are phrasal verbs, tenses etc.) and writing.corpuslab.com.  I would also like to have different language versions: french.corpuslab.com, spanish.corpuslab.com, etc. and would be grateful for any help from list members in developing and/or moderating these non-English sites. 

On a related topic, there are some DDL type sections in the Burdine and Barlow Business Phrasal Verb book. A sample pdf file can be downloaded from corpuslab.com.

I'll be talking about/demoing corpuslab.com at TaLC and EuroCALL later in the year.

Michael

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Michael Barlow
Assoc. Prof. Applied Language Studies
University of Auckland
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