Teaching remedial grammar through data-driven learning using AntPConc

In most Asian countries, students receive between six and eight years of compulsory English education before they enter university. Despite this massive investment in English education, many students, especially in Japan, continue to show a poor understanding of rudimentary grammar rules. In this paper we report on a unique English course designed specifically to address grammar issues at low (remedial) levels using a Data-Driven Learning (DDL) approach. Applications of DDL are becoming more widely reported, but they are generally at the intermediate or advanced level. One of the challenges of using DDL at the remedial level is the lack of suitably leveled corpora. Another challenge is that most corpus tools used in DDL are designed for researchers or advanced learners and thus can appear overly complex. To address these issues, we have developed a simple English corpus built from standard school texts. We have also created a freeware, parallel corpus tool, AntPConc, that is specially designed to be simple, easy, and intuitive to use by beginner learners. Results from the course show significant gains between pre- and post-tests of grammar understanding for beginner-level EFL university students. We also obtained positive student feedback on the AntPConc software

Exploring the Effectiveness of Combined Web-based Corpus Tools for Beginner EFL DDL

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of combining two newly developed web-based tools for the foreign language DDL classroom. One is a KWIC concordance tool, WebParaNews, and the other is a lexical profiling tool, the LagoWordProfiler. Both are freeware and are based on the same parallel corpus, ParaNews, which consists of newspaper texts in English along with their aligned translations in Japanese. Using the same syllabus to teach various types of noun phrases for ten weeks, only one tool was used with the 2013 group, and both of the two tools were used in combination with the 2014 group. In order to reconfirm the effectiveness of combining two tools, both of the two tools were also used in 2015 group. In each year the teaching effect was measured using a pre- and post-test, and students’ feedback was collected using a 31-item questionnaire. Groups using both tools performed better than the single tool group on the gain between the pre- and post-test and gave more positive student feedback. This combined-resource approach using different types of information from two corpus tools may be more helpful for understanding the targeted grammar items than a more traditional single tool approach

An intercultural analysis of prosocial and antisocial behaviours in selected Japanese and western children’s fairy tales

The purpose of this study was to examine twelve Japanese and twelve Western fairy tales to determine how often prosocial and antisocial behaviours appeared, and to find out what specific behaviours were being committed, whether the actions were committed by major or minor characters, what their motives might have been, if there was a difference in the number of prosocial and antisocial behaviours occurring between the historical versions and contemporary versions of the stories, and what possible differences there might be in the perceptions of two Western raters and two Japanese raters who were asked to identify and classify the prosocial and antisocial behaviours. The stories were chosen based on the titles examined in a 1967 study by Lanham and Shimura. The specific editions were selected on the basis of publication date, authenticity of the translation, nationality of the translator, and availability to the researcher. It was found that the Japanese stories contained a slightly higher number of prosocial than antisocial behaviours. The Western stories contained nearly twice as many antisocial behaviours as prosocial behaviours. In looking at the stories, all but two Japanese stories contained either more prosocial behaviours or an approximately equal number of prosocial and antisocial behaviours. In contrast, the majority of the Western stories contained a greater number of antisocial behaviours. Japanese story characters in four stories repented their "bad ways", and the "bad" characters in three Japanese stories and seven Western stories are punished with either a beating, blindness, and torture/death. In the selected Japanese stories, major characters committed most of the prosocial (78 percent) and antisocial behaviours (84 percent). In the Western stories, major characters committed most of the antisocial behaviours (88 percent), and just over half of the prosocial behaviours (59 percent). Although the researcher identified 33 percent of all the identified behaviours as having no specified or implied motive, the raters consistently assigned a motive, based on a subjective interpretation of both the action and the definition of the motives. There was a slight increase in the number of prosocial acts in the contemporary versions of Western stories, although the number of antisocial acts in the Western stories was still greater than the number of prosocial acts. There was only one significant cultural difference found between the Japanese raters and the Western raters, which had to do with the concept of admitting defeat. The researcher explores how prosocial and antisocial behaviours are learned in young children and argues that antisocial messages in children's literature do have an impact on children and their behaviour, and it is the responsibility of parents, teachers and publishers to be aware of the messages in children's literature and to provide guidance in order to help children to become prosocial adults.Education, Faculty ofLanguage and Literacy Education (LLED), Department ofGraduat

A novel, web-based, parallel concordancer for use in the ESL/EFL classroom

To date, the use of parallel concordancers in the classroom has been a largely unexplored area. As a result, there are few guidelines on the design of these tools or the functions they should offer. Also, the number of fully-developed parallel concordance tools is surprisingly few, and most of these are designed for use by corpus linguists and translators. In this paper, we describe a novel, web-based, parallel concordancer designed specifically for use by beginner-level second and foreign language learners of English. The software is built using standard web application tools, such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and thus can run in most university server environments. It is also designed on a similar architecture to the Google search engine, allowing it to work comfortably on very large corpora of hundreds of millions of words. To enable the smooth processing of both English and non-English texts, the concordancer is built to Unicode standards. Its internal token definition settings also employ Unicode character classes meaning that no cumbersome user-defined settings are necessary. Preliminary results show that the new software is considerably faster and easier to use than standard desktop parallel concordance programs. Also, because the tool is web-based, it can be accessed outside of class time, thus allowing students more time for hypothesis-verification and production activities

Paper-Based, Computer-Based, and Combined Data-Driven Learning Using a Web-Based Concordancer1

Very few studies have investigated the use of data-driven learning (DDL) in the beginner-level EFL classroom, and few or no studies have compared the use of paper-based, computer-based and combined approaches. This paper reports on the results of a three-year comparative case study of computer-based, paperbased, and combined computer- and paper-based DDL using a parallel corpus for beginner-level university students. Students followed guided tasks on a worksheet to inductively understand target grammar patterns, had an explicit confirmation or correction of their hypotheses, and did follow up practice. The DDL exercises were done on a bilingual concordancer using newspaper corpus. It was demonstrated that each DDL approach can be effective for improving grammar basics such as understanding and producing noun phrases. Pre- and post-tests showed students made significant gains using all three approaches, and there does not appear to be any significant difference in effectiveness among the three approaches. Literature Revie

Exploring the Effectiveness of Combined Web-based Corpus Tools for Beginner EFL DDL

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of combining two newly developed web-based tools for the foreign language DDL classroom. One is a KWIC concordance tool, WebParaNews, and the other is a lexical profiling tool, the LagoWordProfiler. Both are freeware and are based on the same parallel corpus, ParaNews, which consists of newspaper texts in English along with their aligned translations in Japanese. Using the same syllabus to teach various types of noun phrases for ten weeks, only one tool was used with the 2013 group, and both of the two tools were used in combination with the 2014 group. In order to reconfirm the effectiveness of combining two tools, both of the two tools were also used in 2015 group. In each year the teaching effect was measured using a pre- and post-test, and students’ feedback was collected using a 31-item questionnaire. Groups using both tools performed better than the single tool group on the gain between the pre- and post-test and gave more positive student feedback. This combined-resource approach using different types of information from two corpus tools may be more helpful for understanding the targeted grammar items than a more traditional single tool approach