[Corpora-List] Data-Driven Learning materials

[simon smith]

Dear List Members,
Thanks Alex for summarizing the responses to your post.

I was really impressed by Alex's paper at PALC last year, describing how he
got a group of relatively unmotivated students to conduct an analysis of
English phrasal verbs using corpus tools. That hasn't really been my
experience, though.

I've been re-reading the responses to the extremely interesting question of
why there are fewer DDL resources available than one might expect.

   - *Ramesh, Gill and Martin*: individual teachers do use DDL in class
   to meet specific needs, but don't publish their work or record it in any
   permanent form. It's not easy to get resources into web-ready format.
   - *Jakub*: People might not want to publish resources that they see as
   imperfect in some way.
   - *Chris T*: DDL is inaccessible to many teachers for lack of know-how
   or resources.
   - *Adam*: DDL is inaccessible to many learners, as it presupposes an
   introspective, reflective approach to study, using difficult technology, by
   learners who may not be highly motivated. (Adam didn't say all that, but I
   know he was thinking it)
   - *Fanny and Chris R*: Even if learners are not directly using
   corpora, they may be using materials and resources derived from corpora.
   That counts as DDL too.

Well, there's a category of language learners who will do very well
exploring corpora using concordancers and other query tools. They're
inquisitive, meticulous, and (normally, I think) highly motivated, and
probably love learning about words in their native language too. They
probably read "word of the day" columns, and would probably not do too badly
learning a language under the Grammar Translation model.

But language learning – especially English learning – is something that
everyone pursues these days: not just wordsmiths and book lovers. Some
learners have little time, some have little motivation, many would not
relish the prospect of an hour a day in front of a concordance. Take my
students in a university in Taiwan. I have tried putting concordances up on
the screen, sure. But that's teacher talk, right, and I want them to work
together on tasks and do interactive things in class time. I have tried
setting collocation finding tasks for homework, but homework doesn't really
work, because they have video games to play and need their sleep, and anyway
they'd just copy each other. I suppose I could hand out paper concordances,
and make them look at them in groups, but how dry would that be!

I see a great future for data-driven approaches in generating better
dictionary examples, in making wordlists and fill-in-the-blank exercises and
other items for test or classroom use. It is wonderful that there are books
and offline resources which were produced with the aid of corpora. There are
great opportunities to make corpus based activities, maybe with Hot Potatoes
graphics or computer animations, for use by those who are dedicated enough
to work alone at a computer, or lucky enough to have this provision in
class.
But for the ordinary teacher at the chalk face, and ordinary students with
teenage acne – it seems hard to find a real role for DDL just yet.
Simon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20080424/0a716edb/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora