[Corpora-List] The methodology used by "language learners as researchers"

[Mark Davies]

I'm looking for articles dealing with the topic "The Language Learner as
Researcher".  I'm aware of the large body of research and publications
dealing with the topic of using corpora to teach the L2 to learners, such as
those listed at http://lingo.lancs.ac.uk/devotedto/corpora/misc.htm.  What
I'm looking for, however, is something a bit more narrow:

-- The language learners are advanced students
-- The language learners carry out their own research on topics of interest,
rather than in-class activities designed by the professor
-- The research deals (preferably) with advanced issues in syntax, rather
than basic collocational patterns, etc.
-- (If possible) The research is based on large corpora, such as the BNC,
BoE, Corpus del Español, CREA, etc.

A concrete example of what I'm talking about is the "Variation in Spanish
Syntax" class that I'm offering right now on the web
(http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/sintaxis).  In this class, advanced students
(many of them high school teachers) use several corpora of Spanish and
search tools like Google to carry out their own research on a wide range of
topics relating to syntactic variation in Spanish.

I'm particularly interested in the **methodology** that L2 learners use in
carrying out their research -- i.e. how they learn to carry out searches on
the corpora, how they make hypotheses about the data in question, how they
test these hypotheses, etc.  The basic issue, of course, is that of getting
students to shift from language _learner_ to language _researcher_, and to
follow the correct methodology in order to make valid claims about the L2.

So what I'm looking for are courses (or parts of courses) that are roughly
comparable to what I'm teaching right now.  I'm aware of the work by Claire
Kennedy & Tiziana Miceli of Griffith University and am also aware of the
contents of the most recent three TALC conferences.  But starting points for
research from any other venues would be most appreciated.

Thanks,

Mark Davies

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Mark Davies, Associate Professor, Spanish Linguistics
http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/
4300 Foreign Languages / Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790-4300
309-438-7975 (voice) / 309-438-8038 (fax)
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