Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Assignment 3 (Summary of Empirical Studies)

STUDY 1
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
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



2 comments:

  1. Good synopsis of two empirical studies. Well done.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good to know that.Thank you very much Dr.Rozina =)

    ReplyDelete