Assessing EFL Speech: A Teacher-Focused Perspective

With the aim of better understanding the difficulties that non-native teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) face when assessing oral skills, we conducted an educational training activity for in-service teachers, involving action research and reflective practice. In the first part, 27 non-native teachers were asked to use the scales of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) to assess a number of authentic EFL speech samples taken from a learner corpus. Their assessment was examined quantitatively as well as qualitatively and compared to that of two native professional raters. While the analyses highlighted a good degree of agreement between the teachers as well as between the teachers and the experts, they also confirmed the often-observed tendency for non-native raters to be more severe in their evaluation of L2 performance than native raters. The results also indicated that teachers and native experts do not base their overall assessment on the same aspects of the spoken performance. For the second part of the study, we designed group activities and discussions to help the teachers reflect on their own practices and learn from those adopted by others. The analyses showed that the teachers did not feel well-equipped to assess speech and that they would benefit from appropriate training in this area

Elephants Who Marry Mice are Very Unusual: The Use of the Relative Pronoun Who with Nonhuman Animals

This paper explores the use of the relative pronoun 'who' with nonhuman animals. The paper looks at what dictionaries, an encyclopedia, grammars, publication manuals, newspapers, and news agencies say and do relative to this issue. In addition to investigating the views and practices of these authoritative publications, the study also searched a 100-million-word collection (corpus) of spoken and written English. The study found that while some reference works reject or ignore the use of 'who' with nonhuman animals, other works discuss the possibility, and 'who' does occur in the corpus with nonhuman animals. Explanations for such usage include psychological closeness with particular nonhuman animals and/or features shared with humans. The paper suggests that the use of 'who' with nonhuman animals might play a role in promoting human attitudes and behaviors beneficial to fellow animals. However, it cautions that the correlation between language use, on the one hand, and attitudes and behaviors, on the other hand, is not a perfect one

Causing oneself to do something: The psychodynamics of causative constructions

This paper deals with one particular type of causative construction, namely the periphrastic causative construction where the CAUSER is coreferential with the CAUSEE. This phenomenon is discussed within Talmy’s (1986, 2000) theory of force dynamics, and more precisely his concept of psychodynamics, according to which the human psyche is made up of two entities able to interact with one another. On the basis of corpus data, it will be shown that coreferential causative constructions represent a non-insignificant proportion in authentic English (especially with the verb get). It will also be argued that such constructions deserve a place in the frame of causation, although as less prototypical members than non-coreferential constructions

Bringing the learner back into the picture: Corpora and elicitation in transfer studies

This paper underlines the importance of bringing the learner back into the picture when it comes to the study of transfer. More precisely, it shows that the reliance on corpus data in transfer studies these last few years has resulted in an overemphasis on the actual distance between the learner’s mother tongue and the target language, and the neglect of the learner’s perception of this distance (psychotypology). The introduction of elicitation tests aiming to identify perceived prototypical equivalence is argued for, and a case study on the use of 'indeed' by French-speaking learners illustrates the value of this methodology

Diachronic learner corpus research: Examining learner language through the lens of time

This paper argues for a diachronic approach to the study of learner language and provides a first exploration of the evolution of English as a foreign language over the last twenty-five years, relying on a corpus resource specifically designed for the short-term diachronic analysis of learner English. The paper describes some of the challenges involved in creating such a resource and shows how these challenges have been responded to. It then investigates a number of linguistic features, some of them taken from short-term diachronic research on native English, and highlights certain changes, underlining that these may be the consequence of natural linguistic evolution, but also of other factors characterizing the acquisition of a foreign language

Written learner corpora to inform teaching

This chapter deals with how researchers and practitioners have exploited written learner corpora to inform language teaching. It considers both direct and indirect uses of learner corpora, with a focus on their contribution to dictionaries, grammars and textbooks, as well as data-driven learning. It is shown that the analysis of error-tagged learner corpora or the comparison of learner corpora with native corpora can highlight aspects of learner language which deserve pedagogical attention, and that the metadata of learner corpora can help with the customization of teaching resources. The chapter also highlights certain issues that may have prevented wider use of learner corpora for pedagogical purposes and it offers some recommendations for practice, including more transparency with regard to information derived from learner corpora. Finally, it points to avenues for further developments, in particular with respect to computer-assisted language learning applications and the use of process learner corpora, which represent learners’ writing process through the addition of keystroke logs and/or screencast videos

Language production: A window to the mind?

The human mind is a black box. We know what goes into the box and what goes out, but we do not know what happens inside. However, it is generally accepted that the manifestations of the mind, in particular language, may be used as a reasonable basis to extrapolate about the mind itself, the idea being to study something unobservable by means of something observable. In this article, we will try to learn more about the cognitive phenomenon of salience by analysing two types of language production which are expected to give access to it, namely corpus data and elicitation data. Using the highly polysemous verbs give and take as a case study, we will see that spontaneous production and elicited production may point in different directions, a discrepancy which requires explanation if language production is to be seen as a window to the mind