Corpora as open educational resources for language teaching

Corpora, large electronic collections of texts, have been used in language teaching for several decades. Also known as Data‐Driven Learning (DDL), this method has been gaining popularity because empirical research has consistently shown its effectiveness for learning. However, corpora are still underutilized, especially with learners of languages other than English, at lower proficiency levels, and in non‐university contexts. This is regrettable because DDL has a great potential for developing modular flipped content, especially for hybrid, remote, and online courses. This article first provides an overview of DDL applications and findings of empirical research. Next, it outlines obstacles to wider DDL implementation as well as available and possible solutions. Corpus user guides and exercise collections tied to specific corpora are discussed as one promising direction, and an example of such new open educational resources for teaching German is presented. The article concludes with a discussion of implications and future directions

Recognising a zebra from its stripes and the stripes from “zebra”: the role of verbal labels in selecting category relevant information

Distinguishing members from non-members of some categories can be accomplished by identifying one or several diagnostic features (e.g. zebra-stripes are diagnostic of zebras). Other categories lack diagnostic features (e.g. dogs). Consequently, distinguishing members from non-members requires attending to many correlated dimensions. Interestingly, children and non-human animals are less adept at using diagnostic features compared to adults - possibly due to adults' more developed verbal labelling abilities. We examined whether recognition of categories with diagnostic features ("sparse" categories) is (1) linked to better abilities to selectively attend to relevant information and (2) aided by labelling. In Experiments 1-2, we quantify and validate a measure of category sparsity. Experiment 3 demonstrates that sparse categorisation, assessed by an implicit naming task, correlates with performance in the flanker task, a measure of selective attention. Experiment 4 demonstrates up-regulating activity over Wernicke's area via transcranial direct current stimulation - hypothesised to enhance labelling - selectively improves sparse categorisation