language and gender teaching resources

[Ute Römer]

Dear Emma and others, 

I posted a related query to the CORPORA List yesterday (attached below) in
which I ask about corpus resources which my introduction to language and
gender students could use. I mention the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken
American English which I find a useful resource and MICASE, the Michigan
Corpus of Academic Spoken English, which is searchable and browseable online
at http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/micase/ (they offer a very nice web interface
and you can specify different speaker attributes). Another very nice
resource, I think, is the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT).
For more information you could check the project website at
http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/colt/. 

As for the practical side, I think most of the students are pretty good at
working with concordance programs which are comparatively easy to handle
(such as WordSmith Tools or MonoConc Pro). What I'm planning to do, though,
is schedule one or two sessions for an introduction to corpus analysis and
software demonstrations (and online corpus queries). 

Have a good weekend everyone!
Best... Ute


Here's my query to the CORPORA maillist: 

Dear All,
 
I am in the process of preparing an introductory course on language and
gender and was thinking about compiling a "language and gender studies
corpus sampler" for my students so they can carry out some small-scale
empirical research projects to base their term papers on. For this sampler
it would be ideal to have spoken and/or written corpora with (roughly
comparable) male and female subsections, or just all-male/all-female
talk/writing corpora, or maybe even collections of exclusively gay and/or
lesbian language. 
 
I'm going to include a couple of small and specialised home-made corpora
(literary texts, book reviews, pop/rap song lyrics...), but would also like
to use larger and less specialised ones, such as COLT and (parts of) the
BNC. Does anyone know about a possibility to extract from these corpora
all-female and all-male conversations or male/female authored texts (without
having to read the headers of 4,000+ text files)? I had a look at David
Lee's "BNC Index" Excel spreadsheet but couldn't find sex indicators for
spoken texts (maybe most of them are mixed sex anyway). Also, I would be
grateful for pointers to other corpora which might be appropriate for
L&G-related research (MICASE online is already on my list; and I've
subdivided the transcript files of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken
American English into male/female/mixed groups). 
 
Best wishes and thanks in advance... Ute
 
 
************************************************************
 
Ute Römer
English Department
University of Hanover
Königsworther Platz 1
30167 Hannover
Germany
 
Phone: +49 (0)511 762 2997
Fax: +49 (0)511 762 2996
E-mail: ute.roemer at anglistik.uni-hannover.de
http://www.fbls.uni-hannover.de/angli/



> -----Original Message-----
> From: International Gender and Language Association [mailto:GALA-
> L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Emma Moore
> Sent: Friday, March 26, 2004 5:23 PM
> To: GALA-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Subject: language and gender teaching resources
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I've been invited to submit a bid to the university library to acquire
> resources for the Language and Gender course I'm putting together. I'm
> going to be asking for the usual books etc., but I wondered if anyone
> could recommend any additional resources that they have found helpful in
> their teaching. In particular, I think it might be helpful to have some
> corpora for students to use but am unsure (a) what (if anything) is
> available and (b) how practical it is for students to use such a resource.
> Can anyone advise on teaching resources?
> 
> Many thanks,
> Emma.
> 
> *************************************************************
> Emma Moore
> Lecturer in Sociolinguistics
> Department of English Language and Linguistics
> University of Sheffield
> UK
> 
> Phone: +44 (0)114 222 0232
> Fax: +44 (0)114 276 8251
> E-mail: e.moore at sheffield.ac.uk
> ************************************************************
> 
> 
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