If-conditionals in ICLE and the BNC:a language teaching success story?

This paper aims to contribute to the methodological toolbox of “pedagogy-driven corpus-based research” (Gabrielatos, 2006), that is, research which is situated at the intersection of language description, pedagogical lexicogrammar, and pedagogical materials evaluation (e.g. Harwood, 2005; Hunston & Francis, 1998; Kennedy, 1992; Owen, 1993; Römer, 2004, 2005). The contribution of the present paper mainly lies in proposing a method of triangulating the corpus-based evaluation of lexicogrammatical information in EFL coursebooks, by way of examining a relevant corpus sample of learner written output. More precisely, Gabrielatos (2006) compared the information and examples on if-conditionals in eleven coursebooks for advanced EFL learners with a random sample of 781 if-conditionals from the written BNC (Aston & Burnard, 1998) – using BNCweb (see Hoffmann et al., 2008). The analysis revealed that the common-ground typology – i.e. the information presented in all the coursebooks examined – accounted for just over one-quarter (27.8%) of the if-conditionals in the BNC sample. More importantly, even if the information given in all the sample coursebooks were collated to produce an inclusive typology, it would account for less than three-quarters (72.5%) of the if-conditionals in the BNC sample. Even lower proportions were revealed when the sample of coursebooks included both intermediate and advance coursebooks (Gabrielatos, 2003). The observed under-representation of the variety of if-conditionals in the coursebooks mainly hinged on the following: •The coursebook typologies predominantly focused on conditionals with apodoses expressing degress of likelihood, ignoring or backgrounding conditionals with apodoses expressing deontic or volitional senses. Similalry, coursebooks ignored the type of conditionals termed “indirect” (Quirk et al., 1985), “speech act” (Sweetser, 1990), or “pragmatic” (Athanasiadou & Dirven, 1997) – e.g. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Hammond start forward. “But you promised ...” Spatz interrupted Hammond, his face hard. “I promised nothing, if you recall.” [GUG 121]. •Patterns presented as ‘exceptions’ or ‘special cases’ in the coursebooks proved to be too frequent to be accurately described as such. For example, the coursebooks present Past tense marking with past time reference in protases as a special case – stressing its epistemic interpretation. However, in the BNC sample, one-third of Past tense marking in protases expressed past time. •Modal marking in ‘rules’ and examples was predominantly by way of central and (less so) peripheral modals; lexical modal markers were ignored in both rules and examples. On the basis of the above results, it was hypothesised in the present study that learner written production – when compared to similar texts in the written BNC – would be characterised by the following: a)Under-representation of indirect conditionals. b)Among direct conditionals, an over-representation of conditionals with apodoses expressing degrees of likelihood, and a corresponding under-representation of other types. c)Lower proportion of Past tense marking with past time reference in protases. d)Smaller extent of modal marking in protases. e)Over-representation of central modals. The study aimed to compare the if-conditionals in the random sample from the written BNC with those in a random sample from ICLE (Granger et al., 2002). However, ICLE only contains argumentative essays, whereas the written BNC is richer in text types. For reasons of comparability, only the instances from academic texts, essays and editorials in the BNC sample were considered – resulting in a sample of 195 if-conditionals. Therefore, a random sample of 200 instances was drawn from ICLE – using CQPweb (Hardie, forthcoming). Each if-conditional was annotated for its type, using the typology developed in Gabrielatos (2010), as well as the modal marker and the type of modality in the protases and apodoses. Only hypotheses ‘b’, ‘c’ and, to some extent, ‘d’ were supported by the results – in the other two respects learner production in ICLE was comparable to that of the native speakers in the BNC. However, it would be premature to conclude that the explicit information in coursebooks has limited influence on learner production. ICLE contains the written production of learners having a variety of L1s, and coming from a variety of educational contexts, which can be expected to employ different pedagogical materials and/or instructional approaches. Therefore, the possibility cannot be discounted that the picture emerging from the present analysis may hide country-specific and/or L1-specific variation. References Athanasiadou, A. & R. Dirven (1997) Conditionality, hypotheticality, counterfactuality. In A. Athanasiadou & R. Dirven (eds.) On Conditionals Again (pp. 61–96). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gabrielatos, C. (2003) Conditional sentences: ELT typology and corpus evidence. Paper given at 36th Annual BAAL Meeting, University of Leeds, UK, 4-6 September 2003. [http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/140/] Gabrielatos, C. (2006) Corpus-based evaluation of pedagogical materials: If-conditionals in ELT coursebooks and the BNC. 7th Teaching and Language Corpora Conference, Paris, France, 1-4 July 2006. [http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/882/] Gabrielatos, C. (2008). If-conditionals, modality, and Schrödinger’s cat. Paper presented at the RITL Research Group (Research in Theoretical Linguistics), Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, 27 November 2008. [http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/39788/] Gabrielatos, C. (2010) A corpus-based examination of English if-conditionals through the lens of modality: Nature and types. PhD Thesis. Lancaster University, UK. Gabrielatos, C. & Torgersen, E. (2009). A corpus-based sociolinguistic analysis of indefinite article use in London English. ICAME 30, Lancaster, UK, 27-31 May 2009. [http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/26562/1/ICAME30-indefinite_article.pdf] Gabrielatos, C., Torgersen, E., Hoffmann, S. & Fox, S. (2010). A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of indefinite article forms in London English. Journal of English Linguistics, 38(4), 297-334. Granger, S., Dagneux, E. & Meunier, F. (2002) The International Corpus of Learner English. Version 1.1. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Hardie, A. (forthcoming) CQPweb – compining power, flexibility and usability in a coprus analysis tool. Harwood, N. (2005) What do we want EAP teaching materials for? Journal of English for Academic Purposes 4(2), 149–161. Hoffmann, S., Evert, S., Smith, N., Lee, D. & Berglund-Prytz, Y. (2008) Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb - a practical guide. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Hunston, S. & Francis, G. (1998) Verbs observed: A corpus-driven pedagogic grammar. Applied Linguistics 19(1): 45-72. Kennedy, G. (1992) Preferred ways of putting things with implications for language teaching. In J. Svartvik (ed.) Directions in Corpus Linguistics: Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium 82, Stockholm, 4-8 August 1991 (pp. 335-378). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Owen, C. (1993). Corpus-based grammar and the Heineken effect: Lexico-grammatical description for language learners. Applied Linguistics 14(2): 167-187. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech & J. Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Römer, U. (2004) Textbooks: A corpus-driven approach to modal auxiliaries and their didactics. In J. McH. Sinclair (ed.) How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching (pp. 185–199). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Römer, U. (2005) Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy: A corpus-driven approach to progressive forms, functions, contexts and didactics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sweetser, E.E. (1990) From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Introducing a corpus of conversational stories. Construction and annotation of the Narrative Corpus

Although widely seen as critical both in terms of its frequency and its social significance as a prime means of encoding and perpetuating moral stance and configuring self and identity, conversational narrative has received little attention in corpus linguistics. In this paper we describe the construction and annotation of a corpus that is intended to advance the linguistic theory of this fundamental mode of everyday social interaction: the Narrative Corpus (NC). The NC contains narratives extracted from the demographically-sampled sub-corpus of the British National Corpus (BNC) (XML version). It includes more than 500 narratives, socially balanced in terms of participant sex, age, and social class. We describe the extraction techniques, selection criteria, and sampling methods used in constructing the NC. Further, we describe four levels of annotation implemented in the corpus: speaker (social information on speakers), text (text Ids, title, type of story, type of embedding etc.), textual components (pre-/post-narrative talk, narrative, and narrative-initial/final utterances), and utterance (participation roles, quotatives and reporting modes). A brief rationale is given for each level of annotation, and possible avenues of research facilitated by the annotation are sketched out

Using corpora to develop learners’ collocational competence

This article investigates the role of direct corpus use in learners’ collocational competence in academic writing. An experiment was conducted between two groups of Chinese postgraduates who had no previous knowledge of corpora. It was embedded in a regular 4-month linguistics course in the students’ programmes, where a corpus-assisted method was used for the experimental group and a traditional, or rule-based, method was used for the control group. The English essays written by these two groups of learners from different time periods (before, immediately after, and two months after the course) were analysed regarding the learners’ collocational use—in particular, verb-preposition collocations. The results reveal that while both groups showed improvements in their academic writing, the students in the experimental group displayed a significant improvement in the use of collocations, including a higher rate of accuracy, or naturalness, and an increased use of academic collocations and fixed phraseological items. It is thus concluded that the knowledge and use of corpora can help students raise their awareness of habitual collocational use and develop their collocational competence. This supports the positive role of direct corpus application in an EFL context

Corpus based study of verby explain and clarify as an example of assistance in pedagogical settings

The use of synonymy and near-synonymy allows us to differently express similar ideas and meanings, as well as perspectives. However, their use and nuances may be unclear to language learners, such as the selected case of the verbs explain and clarify. This paper examines the usage of the two verbs by looking into corpus data and uses Sinclair\u27s methodological procedure as an alternative to dictionary references. Also included is a discussion of aspects and criticisms of corpus linguistics, mentions (and uses of) computer technologies for the analysis of language by discovering usage patterns, significant exceptions and semantic prosody, and exploring whether using corpora in the classroom would be beneficial to language learners

A Study Of Data Informatics: Data Analysis And Knowledge Discovery Via A Novel Data Mining Algorithm

Frequent pattern mining (fpm) has become extremely popular among data mining researchers because it provides interesting and valuable patterns from large datasets. The decreasing cost of storage devices and the increasing availability of processing power make it possible for researchers to build and analyze gigantic datasets in various scientific and business domains. A filtering process is needed, however, to generate patterns that are relevant. This dissertation contributes to addressing this need. An experimental system named fpmies (frequent pattern mining information extraction system) was built to extract information from electronic documents automatically. Collocation analysis was used to analyze the relationship of words. Template mining was used to build the experimental system which is the foundation of fpmies. With the rising need for improved environmental performance, a dataset based on green supply chain practices of three companies was used to test fpmies. The new system was also tested by users resulting in a recall of 83.4%. The new algorithm\u27s combination of semantic relationships with template mining significantly improves the recall of fpmies. The study\u27s results also show that fpmies is much more efficient than manually trying to extract information. Finally, the performance of the fpmies system was compared with the most popular fpm algorithm, apriori, yielding a significantly improved recall and precision for fpmies (76.7% and 74.6% respectively) compared to that of apriori (30% recall and 24.6% precision)

Variation in morphological productivity in the BNC : Sociolinguistic and methodological considerations

WOS:000291539000006The first aim of this work is to examine gender-based variation in the productivity of the nominal suffixes -ness and -ity in present-day British English. Possible interpretations are presented for the findings that -ity is used less productively by women, while with -ness there is no gender difference. The second aim is to analyse the validity of hapax-based measures of productivity in sociolinguistic research. It is discovered that they require a significantly larger corpus than type-based ones, and that the category-conditioned degree of productivity P is unusable when comparing subcorpora based on social groups. Otherwise, hapax legomena remain a theoretically well-founded component of productivity measures.Peer reviewe