Lecture: Data-Driven Learning: Can and Should Language Learners Become Corpus Linguists?

[Lori Straus]

Data-Driven Learning: Can and Should Language Learners Become Corpus Linguists?

Corpora, or large digital textual databases, have been attracting the attention of language educators since their emergence in the 1960s. Materials developers have used corpus information to create reference grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks that more adequately represent the target language than artificial examples. More recently, applied corpus linguists started using corpora in their language classes in a more direct fashion: while either creating corpus-based worksheets for classroom use or teaching their students to search corpora in order to complete learning tasks. Nevertheless, such more direct corpus-based applications, a.k.a. Data-Driven Learning (DDL), are still far from common pedagogical practice. One of the obstacles for a wider spread of DDL is its discovery-based nature that is akin to hypothesis-building and hypothesis-testing in academic research, which is deemed too challenging for language learners, especially at lower second language (L2) proficiency levels. In this talk, I address this challenge and ask the question: can and should we expect language learners to become researchers, or corpus linguists?

About the Speaker

Nina Vyatkina is an Associate Professor of German and Applied Linguistics at the University of Kansas. Currently, she is an investigator on a learner corpus research project<https://www.linguistik.hu-berlin.de/en/institut-en/professuren-en/korpuslinguistik/research/kandel> that involves international collaboration with Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She is a co-recipient of the 2009 Paul Pimsleur Award for Research in Foreign Language Education<http://www.actfl.org/?pageID=5332> (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages / The Modern Language Journal). Read an interview with Dr. Vyatkina on digital humanities research<http://idrh.ku.edu/profile/nina-vyatkina>.

Date: Friday, May 5th
Time: 4PM
Room: ML245
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Lori Straus
Administrative Assistant
Waterloo Centre for German Studies<https://artsonline.uwaterloo.ca/wcgs/>
University of Waterloo<http://uwaterloo.ca/>

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Email: lstraus at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:lstraus at uwaterloo.ca>

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