36.1069, FYI: Swansea Uni Language Research Centre seminar: 2nd April @1pm UK time Emma Marsden (University of York) & Natalie Finlayson" Creating and evaluating corpus-informed word lists for adolescent, beginner-to-low-intermediate learners of French, German, and Spanish"

Fri Mar 28 03:05:05 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1069. Fri Mar 28 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1069, FYI: Swansea Uni Language Research Centre seminar: 2nd April @1pm UK time Emma Marsden (University of York) & Natalie Finlayson" Creating and evaluating corpus-informed word lists for adolescent, beginner-to-low-intermediate learners of French, German, and Spanish"

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Joel Jenkins, Daniel Swanson, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Joel Jenkins <joel at linguistlist.org>

================================================================

Date: 27-Mar-2025
From: Vivienne Rogers [v.e.rogers at swansea.ac.uk]
Subject: Swansea Uni Language Research Centre seminar: 2nd April @1pm UK time Emma Marsden (University of York) & Natalie Finlayson" Creating and evaluating corpus-informed word lists for adolescent, beginner-to-low-intermediate learners of French, German, and Spanish"

SWANSEA UNIVERSITY
LANGUAGE RESEARCH CENTRE SEMINAR SERIES
Wednesday, 2nd April, 13:00-14:00 UK time (BST/ GMT+1)
Zoom Link:
https://swanseauniversity.zoom.us/j/96688743280?pwd=AWZa1tmmRtaIeWLmcHGS9GpzzwJM8b.1
Creating and evaluating corpus-informed word lists for adolescent,
beginner-to-low-intermediate learners of French, German, and Spanish
Professor Emma Marsden (University of York) & Dr Natalie Finlayson
We describe recent changes to the lexical content of GCSE examinations
in French, German, and Spanish as foreign languages in secondary
schools in England, where optional topic-based guide lists have been
replaced by obligatory frequency-informed lists. Drawing on Finlayson
et al. (2024) and Marsden et al. (2023), we outline the steps, taken
in collaboration with teachers and members of an awarding
organization, to create corpus-informed lists based on frequency,
word-topic relatedness, and teacher judgments of usefulness,
relevance, and difficulty. The new lists are much shorter than the
previous guide lists yet provide substantially greater coverage of
four, adolescent-relevant corpora. We discuss reasons for these
findings,and highlight potential uses and concerns related to
wordlists.
Natalie held roles as a Learning Resource Developer and Research
Associate at the University of York from 2019-2024. Her work focused
on creating and evaluating word lists and learning resources to
support curriculum and pedagogy and the new GCSE subject content for
French, German, and Spanish, gathering evidence to support
recommendations to the subject review panel, and managing the
development of the MultilingProfiler lexical profiling tool. She has
also served as a Research Assistant in Education at the University of
Leeds and a Research Fellow in corpus linguistics at the University of
Birmingham. Natalie is currently Assistant Editor for the
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.
Having taught French, Spanish, and English as foreign languages in
schools in England and Chile at the start of her career, Emma Marsden
has been professor of second language education since 2018 in the
Department of Education at the University of York. With colleagues and
students, Emma has written about 90 publications on language learning
and teaching and open scholarship, with an ever-growing interest in
lexical studies! She directs the open research repositories
iris-database.org and oasis-database.org, and from 2015 to 2022, was
Associate Editor and then Journal Editor ofLanguage Learning. Between
2018-2023 she directed the National Centre for Excellence for Language
Pedagogy (now https://ldpedagogy.york.ac.uk/).

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Language Acquisition

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     French (fra)
                     German (deu)
                     Spanish (spa)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List to support the student editors:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Elsevier Ltd http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

Wiley http://www.wiley.com

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1069
----------------------------------------------------------