Assignment 3 (Summary of Empirical Studies)

STUDY 1

ESL STUDENT ATTITUDES TOWARD CORPUS USE IN L2 WRITING
BY: HYUNSOOK YOON & ALAN HIRVELA

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, USA

•          PURPOSE:  To describe corpus use in ESL academic writing courses and to examine students’ corpus use behavior; perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of corpora as a second language writing tool.

•          METHOD:

•          PARTICIPANTS: 22 students from intermediate or advanced level ESL writing course at a large American university (majority from East Asia continents).

•          INSTRUMENT: Collins COBUILD Corpus http://www.titania.cobuild.co.uk (how to construct prototypes of words, i.e., descriptions or portraits of common usage patterns involving keywords (based on frequency of use information provided by the corpus database)).

•          DATA COLLECTION: study 10-week term- informal / semi-structured interview-questionnaires.

•          RESULT: SURVEY:

-          Computer use: personal purposes (91%) as opposed to schoolwork (59%).

-           Reported that more than half of their total computer time (68%) was in their L1.

-          The students’ assessment of the usefulness of the corpus: majority of students class 1 (intermediated) 100%; class 2  (advanced) 93%.

-          The corpus use was the most helpful for learning the usage of vocabulary and phrases. 

•          ANALYSIS:

•          Overall, the students perceived the corpus approach as beneficial to the development of L2 writing skill and increased confidence toward L2 writing.

•           These figures (survey) illustrates students’ access to technology impacts their prospects for independent work with corpora--a preference for using a computer in their language learning--interest with respect to feelings about corpus-based activity.

•          In general, the students reported positive attitudes toward corpus use in relation to writing. There was a particularly strong belief in the idea that the corpus use improved their general writing skills/build confidence in L2 writing.

STUDY 2

ELISA – A Pedagogically Enriched Corpus for Language Learning Purposes 
By: Sabine Braun

University of Tübingen

Purpose:  To introduce/suggest methodological solution for the design and exploitation of relevant corpus that is dedicated to pedagogical goals.

Methods:  ELISA, (English Language Interview Corpus as a Second language Application), a small corpus of spoken English -video interviews (about careers).

Level: Secondary school students.

Result:

One of the major problems learners face when working with corpus data such as word lists or concordances is that they do not necessarily have the analytical skills required for the interpretation of this type of data. It is, therefore, crucial to give learners very focused and manageable study tasks and to design tasks which are communicatively relevant (or authentic).

Advantages of using ELISA in DLL (Data-driven Language Learning):

• The visual, gestural and intonational clues in the video clips greatly help to contextualise and clarify problematic utterances.
• Audiovisual corpora open up entirely new ways of exploitation--can be used for listening comprehension activities.
• The division of the interviews into sections and the possibility to call up the corresponding video sequence for each section facilitates more detailed comprehension tasks.
• The integration of comprehension questions and exercises into the corpus further increases the efficiency of comprehension training with the help the videos.
• Since ELISA includes interviews with speakers of different national origin, it can also be used to train learners in understanding different varieties as required e.g. by the German teaching curricula (syllabus) for English in secondary schools.

Analysis:

·         The corpus design solution suggested here caters for a range of learner needs and interests, and supports a variety of teaching methods. 

·         It enables learners and teachers to access a corpus from different but pedagogically appropriate 'entry points' and explicitly supports the possibility to choose and combine different methods of exploration. 

·         A corpus designed according to this method is a pedagogical resource which can be exploited more comprehensively than has traditionally been possible with corpora in language learning and teaching.

Bibliography

Braun, S. (2006). ELISA – A Pedagogically Enriched Corpus foLanguage Learning Purposes. Corpus Technology and Language Pedagogy , 25- 47.  http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1292/1/fulltext.pdf

Hyunsook Yoon &  Alan H. (2004). ESL Student Attitudes Toward Corpus Use in L2 Writing. Journal of Second Language Writing , 257-283. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science

Assignment 3 : Presentation on Corpus Lingusitics in Language Learning and Teaching

APPENDIX : Assignment 2

ASSIGNMENT 2 : COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION

Group Members: Naheed Binti Azhari (0715986)

       Nik Izyani Bt Nik Nordin (0715784)

       Melati Binti Mohd Noor (0718098)

       Raihan Binti Mansor (0719576)

Section              : 1

Course Code      : ENGL 4740

Course Title       : Computer Applications in Language Studies

Instructor           : Dr. Rozina Bt. Abdul Ghani

Date Submitted: 15th February 2011

Kuliyyah          : IRKHS, IIUM

Introduction

According to Holmes (2008), it is suggested by a linguist called Lakoff that women always use certain linguistic features in their speech. Those features are lexical hedges, tag questions, rising intonation on declaratives, ‘empty’ adjectives, precise colour terms, intensifiers, ‘hypercorrect’ grammars, ‘superpolite’ forms, avoidance of strong swear words and emphatic stress. However, in this paper there will be exclusion on two features i.e.: precise colour terms and ‘hypercorrect’ grammars. This paper will look at how the other linguistic features that are mostly used by women in their speech is transferred into written form specifically while writing comments in one of the most famously used social networking systems (SNS) which is Facebook.  Will there be a similarity in the way it is used in speech form and written form and whether it is only used by female or the features are also found in speeches of males. Other than that, this paper also looks into which linguistic feature that stands out most out of the eight features. Samples of lines (English) written by participants (men and women) were taken randomly from a few profiles of Facebook accounts. The corpus was then analysed by looking at those linguistic features of women’s language suggested by Lakoff.

Literature Review

The advent of internet and social networking system has leading to the advancement of linguistics issues in relations to computational linguistics. Ruane (2007) in Weavers & Warriors? Gender And Online Identity In 1997 And 2007 V1.0 found the advent of internet has reshaped how gender is performed in electronic communication as gender of net users is not only recognized by their words alone (though physically invisible) but in detailed profiles, avatar images and usernames depict the gender of the users since there is no communication in human conditions without physically involve the body as the reference such as women use overtly feminine usernames compare to men (their masculine). Interestingly, the traditional of Lakoff’s theory of women’s language gradually changing with the using of social interactions on the internet in which study found women do not use more passive, cooperative and accommodating language perhaps due to the participant’s changing as well. Further, internet is no longer a boy’s club since recent research shows that woman is increasing in using internet.

Furthermore, the article on Changes in Use and Perception of Facebook by Lampe, Ellison and Steinfield (2008) looked at how the use of Facebook has changed over time. Users of Facebook in particular are amongst college attendees have been growing in other populations as well. According to the authors, the systems can undergo radical changes as user populations may change, and individual users' social context may evolve. Social computing sites can affect how members of a site use and perceive it. Reported uses of the site remain relatively constant over time, but the perceived audience for user profiles and attitudes about the site show differences over the study period. The results shows that pattern, perception and attitude sometimes change over time, even though rarely occur drastically. Lampe et.al assume that when changes occur, it may result from changes in the user's social context such as moving to or from college, and perhaps in response to major changes in features, such as the introduction of the News Feed on Facebook.

Lastly, Gosling, Gaddis and Vazire (2007) in Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles found there is an issue of how viewing an individual’s profile can be claimed as the process of getting to know others and give the very first exposure. The study conducted by them examined on 133 Facebook profiles and compared them with how the targets see themselves and are seen by close friends. So, they were doing the research by comparing personality assessments made solely on the basis of Facebook profiles to a series of other personality’s measurement. They used the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) which measures the Big Five personality dimensions namely Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and Openness to Experience. As a result, it suggests that online social networking websites are in fact a relevant means of communicating personality. This is also quite relevant to what we are going to focus which is how the use of women’s language in Facebook can show someone’s credibility.

Findings

The usage of Women’s Language across genders in social network system:Facebook

Lakoff’s Women’s Language	Gender		Total
	Men	Women
1.      Lexical hedges	2	12	14
2.      Tag question	1	2	3
3.      Rising intonation on declaratives	12	40	52
4.      ‘Empty’ adjectives	0	23	23
5.      Intensifiers	3	19	22
6.      ‘Superpolite’ forms	0	7	7
7.      Avoidance of strong swear words	3	7	10
8.      Emphatic stress	0	11	11
Total	21	121	142

Table 1

Discussion

       According to the findings, it is found that women’s language is used in written form the same as it is used in speech form. And some of them are used both by men and women but it is proved that women used all of the features in both forms.

     The most highly used linguistic feature of women’s language is rising intonation on declaratives with 12 times used by men and 40 times used by women. The examples are “I wanna get top’s black shirt!!” and “Haven’t have time to go yet. Uhh!!! I wanna buy Dae’s”. The used of exclamation marks repeatedly in those sentences indicates the rising intonation on declaratives used.

     The least used of linguistic feature of women’s language found in this paper is tag questions where it only appears three times which is once by men and twice by women. In addition, it shows that men did not use any of ‘empty’ adjectives, ‘superpolite’ forms and emphatic stress kind of women’s language in their writing.

Conclusion

     There should be reasons why women tend to use more rising intonation on declaratives rather than other kind of women’s language linguistic features as suggested by Lakoff. From the point of view of this paper, the main reason to why women tend to use rising intonation on declaratives in written form is probably because they want to convey the message as similar as it sounds in their speech as women are known to be categorized as ‘feelers’. They tend to put importance on emotions while conveying messages whether in verbal or written forms. Therefore, it is not surprised that the result of the used of rising intonation on declaratives by women outnumbered other linguistic features of women’s language suggested by Lakoff.


References

C. Lampe, N. B. Ellison & C. Steinfield. (2008). ACM DL LIBRARY: Malaysial Consortium International Islamic University Malaysia- Gombak (IIUM). Retrieved February 7, 2011, from Changes in use and perception of facebook: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1470000/1460675/p721-lampe.pdf?key1=1460675&key2=6190100031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=210.48.222.6&CFID=12200937&CFTOKEN=50748875

D. Ruane. (2007). UTS: Transforming Clutures eJournal. Retrieved February 11, 2011, from Weavers & Warriors? Gender and Online Identity in 1997 and 2007 V1.0: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/TfC/article/viewArticle/637

Holmes, J. (2008). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (3rd Edition ed.). UK: Pearson Education Limited.

S. D. Gosling, S. Gaddis & S. Visire.  (2007, March 26-28). International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Retrieved February 8, 2007, from Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles: http://www.icwsm.org/papers/3--Gosling-Gaddis-Vazire.pdf