University of Birmingham, 24–25 June 2010
The event (co-ordinated by Alison Sealey and Paul Thompson, University of Birmingham) was divided so that the first day focused mainly on the use of corpus-informed teaching with L1 learners and the second on additional language teaching contexts.
Paul Thompson (University of Birmingham) opened the seminar with an overview of published reports on uses of corpus evidence and approaches in teaching about language, in L1 and L2 classrooms. The second speaker was Alison Sealey (University of Birmingham), who described some of the findings from the ESRC funded study ‘Corpus-based learning about language in the primary-school’. She explained how the research was carried out, and presented examples of the kinds of metalinguistic awareness demonstrated by these eight-to-ten-year old children as they responded to activities enabling interaction with a corpus of writing for children.
The focus moved to students in the English secondary school classroom with Jane Bradbury (Kings Norton Boys’ School, Birmingham) and Gill Francis, who demonstrated their ‘Lesson openers for language awareness (LOLA) in the GCSE and A-level classroom’. This resource, which is still under development, is used for quick, 10- or 15-minute, corpus-based activities that serve as a stimulating starter to an English class. Still in the L1 English secondary classroom, Dan Clayton (University College London) explained his project that brings together the corpus of spoken and written English from the Survey of English Usage at UCL and the Moodle VLE platform, with the intention of creating a web-based teaching and learning platform tailored to the goals of the National Curriculum's Key Stages 3–5. Julie Blake and Tim Shortis are educational consultants and Visiting Research Associates at King's College, London, and their presentation was about ‘Framing the ‘‘impact’’ of corpus approaches in the L1 classroom’. Although they cautioned against uncritical acceptance and unrealistic expectations of corpora as a ‘technical fix’ to improve the way language is studied in schools, they nevertheless reported on some pathfinding work using corpus approaches in UK secondary school English teaching and learning.
Chris Warren, a Teachit Education Development Manager, then discussed various possibilities for applying corpus approaches to the secondary English classroom, demonstrating some experimental materials he has developed as GCSE resources, where corpus results are used to inspire creative writing and analytical techniques applied to poetry. The teaching context explored by Renata Zanin (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) was the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, which has two official languages, German and Italian, as well as obligatory language courses including English as a third language from primary school onwards. Renata described the challenges for fostering language awareness in teacher education, and the role of corpora in developing autonomous language learning, after which Nigel Bruce (CAES, Hong Kong University) described a course where a simplified concordancing package was used with a specialised set of legal corpora, suggesting how the approach could be adapted to different contexts.
The second day began with three brief presentations of relevant resources. Diana McCarthy demonstrated how SketchEngine is being modified to provide a more accessible interface for inexperienced users, including learners. Crayton Walker demonstrated his ‘collocation dominoes’ game, a corpus-based teaching resource under commercial development, and Andrew Dickinson showed how his online corpus resource for UK schools, currently called ‘Skylight’, is to feature a very simple user interface and access to a huge range of corpora directly relevant to programmes of study in English language and literature.
Maggie Charles (Oxford University Language Centre) reported on a 12-hour course in which students constructed and examined their own ‘quick and dirty’ corpora of research articles in their fields. Alex Boulton (Nancy Université) described some resistance to the use of corpora for language teaching and learning in French higher education, before summarising his own research studies into how effective corpus approaches can be in this context. Kuei-Ju Tsai (University of Bristol) described some encouraging findings from an exploratory study with undergraduate EFL learners in Taiwan. Clare O'Donoghue (Middlesex University) reported on ‘ten years of using student corpus investigation in the ELT classroom’, illustrating a range of types of task and students’ reactions.
In her presentation ‘Encouraging EFL teachers to use corpora in the classroom’, Ana Frankenberg-Garcia (ISLA-Lisboa) emphasised the importance of teachers developing a sense of when and how corpus consultation can be realistically transposed to the language classroom, illustrating her talk with examples of combining corpus-based activities with conventional language lessons. Finally, Benet Vincent (Sabanci University School of Languages) reported teacher and student views about putting paper-based Data-Driven Learning into practice, in the context of an EAP preparatory course in a Turkish university.
To close the event, participants joined a general discussion about how to capitalise on the interest and contributions shared during the two days.
