Replicating corpus-based research in English for academic purposes: Proposed replication of Cortes () and Biber and Gray ()

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Taha Omidian ◽  
Oliver James Ballance ◽  
Anna Siyanova-Chanturia

Abstract Accurate description of language use is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) practice. Thanks to the development of corpus tools, it has been possible to undertake systematic studies of language in academic contexts. This line of research aims to provide detailed and accurate characterization of academic communication and to ultimately inform EAP practice. Very few studies, however, have attempted to ascertain whether, and to what the extent, corpus-based findings have achieved such goals. The diverse nature of EAP, and the unique methodological challenges involved in compiling and using corpora, provide sufficient incentive for replication research in this area. The present article makes a case for replication of corpus-based studies in the field of EAP. It argues that replication research not only enhances the credibility of corpus linguistics for EAP pedagogy and research but also provides practical advice for EAP teachers and materials designers. It then looks at how two key corpus-based studies on the topic, Cortes (2013) and Biber and Gray (2010), can be replicated with respect to replication approaches described in Porte (2012).

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Eska Perdana Prasetya ◽  
Anita Dewi Ekawati ◽  
Deni Sapta Nugraha ◽  
Ahmad Marzuq ◽  
Tiara Saputri Darlis

<span lang="EN-GB">This research is about Corpus Linguistics, Language Corpora, And Language Teaching. As we know about this science is relatively new and is associated with technology. There are several areas discussed in this study such as several important parts of the corpus, the information generated in the corpus, four main characteristics of the corpus, Types of Corpora, Corpora in Language Teaching, several types that could be related to corpus research, Applications of corpus linguistics to language teaching may be direct or indirect. The field of applied linguistics analyses large collections of written and spoken texts, which have been carefully designed to represent specific domains of language use, such as informal speech or academic writing.</span>


Author(s):  
Rodrigo Borba

Sex work has long been of interest to a variety of fields, among them anthropology, sociology, public health, and feminist theory, to name but a few. However, with very few exceptions, sociolinguistics seems to have ignored the fact that commercial sex, as an intersubjective business transaction, is primarily negotiated in embodied linguistic interaction. By reviewing publications in distinct social scientific areas that directly or indirectly discuss the role of language in the sex industry, this chapter critically assesses the analytical affordances and methodological challenges for a sociolinguistics of sex work. It does so by discussing the “tricks” played by sex work, as a power-infused context of language use in which issues of agency (or lack thereof) are paramount, on sociolinguistic theory and methods. The chapter concludes that the study of language in commercial sex venues is sociolinguistically promising and epistemologically timely.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 213
Author(s):  
Julia Nee

Long-format speech environment (LFSE) recordings are increasingly used to understand language acquisition among young children (Casillas & Cristia 2019). But in language revitalization, older children are sometimes the largest demographic acquiring a language. In Teotitlán del Valle, Mexico, older children have participated in Zapotec language revitalization workshops since 2017. To better understand how these children use language, and to probe whether the language workshops impact language use, I invited learners to collect LFSE recordings. This study addresses two main questions: (1) what methodological challenges emerge when children ages 6-12 collect LFSE data?; and (2) what do the data suggest about the effects of the Zapotec workshops? I argue that, while creating LFSE recordings with older children presents methodological challenges, the results are useful in highlighting the importance of not only teaching language skills, but of creating spaces where learners are comfortable using the Zapotec language.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (22) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Luisa Chierichetti

This article, based on the most recent studies on telecinematic dialogue, proposes a contribution to linguistic research on television series, one of the most influential popular cultural products in contemporary society. The work is based on the complete scripts of the successful Spanish series Águila Roja, aired on Radio Televisión Española between 2009 and 2016. Combining techniques of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, this study examines the characterization of Satur, one of the main characters of this fiction, through the co-construction of the meaning, as processed by the television audience. The results suggest that Satur’s discourse is characterized by the use of contemporary colloquial language and by incongruity; such features create humor and familiarity with the audience.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelica Galante ◽  
Kerstin Okubo ◽  
Christina Cole ◽  
Nermine Abd Elkader ◽  
Nicola Carozza ◽  
...  

Previous literature on higher education suggests the inclusion of pedagogy that is linguistically and culturally inclusive in settings with increasing multilingualism, which is the case in Canada. Yet, little is known as to how the implementation of such pedagogy can take place, particularly in language programs. This article reports a researcher-instructor collaboration that aimed at implementing plurilingual practices, such as translanguaging, plurilingual identity, comparons nos langues, and intercomprehension over 4 months in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program at a university in Toronto, Canada. Seven EAP instructors collaborated with a researcher to implement weekly plurilingual tasks: They conducted an environment analysis, examined the logistics of implementation, and collaboratively examined the tasks. The article presents the process of implementation of the plurilingual tasks and proposes a framework for collaboration with four key elements: administrative support, openness to the use of languages other than English in class, weekly collaborative checks with the researcher, and the learner-centered nature of the tasks. Implications for the implementation of plurilingualism in English language programs in higher education are discussed. La littérature existante sur l’enseignement supérieur suggère l’inclusion d’une pédagogie linguistiquement et culturellement inclusive là où le multilinguisme est en hausse, ce qui est le cas au Canada. On sait toutefois peu de choses sur la façon dont la mise en œuvre d’une telle pédagogie pourrait s’effectuer, particulièrement dans les programmes de langue. Le présent article rend compte d’une collaboration entre une chercheuse et plusieurs professeurs qui portait sur la mise en œuvre de pratiques plurilingues comme le translangagisme, l’identité plurilingue, Comparons nos langues, et l’intercompréhension sur une période de 4 mois dans le cadre d’un cours d’anglais académique (EAP) offert dans une université de Toronto, au Canada. Sept professeurs d’anglais académique ont collaboré avec une chercheuse à la mise en œuvre de tâches plurilingues hebdomadaires, et ce, en réalisant une analyse de l’environnement, en examinant la logistique de la mise en œuvre et en collaborant à l’examen des tâches. L’article présente le processus de mise en œuvre des tâches plurilingues et propose un cadre de collaboration comportant quatre éléments clés : soutien administratif, ouverture à l’utilisation de langues autres que l’anglais en classe, contrôles collaboratifs hebdomadaires avec la chercheuse et choix de tâches centrées sur l’apprenante ou l’apprenant. Les implications de la mise en œuvre du plurilinguisme à l’intérieur des programmes de langue anglaise dans l’enseignement supérieur font l’objet d’une discussion.


Terminology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonie Grön ◽  
Ann Bertels

Abstract Due to its specific linguistic properties, the language found in clinical records has been characterized as a distinct sublanguage. Even within the clinical domain, though, there are major differences in language use, which has led to more fine-grained distinctions based on medical fields and document types. However, previous work has mostly neglected the influence of term variation. By contrast, we propose to integrate the potential for term variation in the characterization of clinical sublanguages. By analyzing a corpus of clinical records, we show that the different sections of these records vary systematically with regard to their lexical, terminological and semantic composition, as well as their potential for term variation. These properties have implications for automatic term recognition, as they influence the performance of frequency-based term weighting.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-241
Author(s):  
Yevgen Matusevych ◽  
Ad Backus ◽  
Martin Reynaert

This article is about the type of language that is offered to learners in textbooks, using the example of Russian. Many modern textbooks of Russian as a foreign language aim at efficient development of oral communication skills. However, some expressions used in the textbooks are not typical for everyday language. We claim that textbooks’ content should be reassessed based on actual language use, following theoretical and methodological models of cognitive and corpus linguistics. We extracted language patterns from three textbooks, and compared them with alternative patterns that carry similar meaning by (1) calculating the frequency of occurrence of each pattern in a corpus of spoken language, and (2) using Russian native speakers’ intuitions about what is more common. The results demonstrated that for 39 to 53 percent of all the recurrent patterns in the textbooks better alternatives could be found. We further investigated the typical shortcomings of the extracted patterns.


1983 ◽  
Vol 20 (01) ◽  
pp. 202-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Kimeldorf ◽  
Peter F. Thall

It has been recently proved that if N, X 1, X 2, … are non-constant mutually independent random variables with X 1,X 2, … identically distributed and N non-negative and integer-valued, then the independence of and implies that X 1 is Bernoulli and N is Poisson. A well-known theorem in point process theory due to Fichtner characterizes a Poisson process in terms of a sum of independent thinnings. In the present article, simultaneous generalizations of both of these results are provided, including a joint characterization of the multinomial distribution and the Poisson process.


2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guadalupe Ruiz Yepes ◽  
Ramesh Krishnamurthy

AbstractWith increasing demands for the use of authentic language in the teaching of a second language, the potential role of corpora has been an important issue of discussion in the last two decades. Corpora have helped to reveal patterns of real language use and uncovered discrepancies between the language portrayed in textbooks and the language used in real life.This article focuses on corpus-driven as well as corpus-based grammar teaching, summarising the experience of applying ACORN (the Aston Corpus Network) in the teaching of Spanish Grammar to students in the School of Languages and Social Sciences at Aston University. Our main goals were to show the students a large number of examples taken from authentic language texts, in order to support the grammar explained in class, and to provide them with a very useful resource that they can use while writing essays, preparing for exams, etc.


2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Wissenburg

AbstractPerhaps the most animated debate in green political thought-the subdiscipline of political theory devoted to the relations between humanity, politics and environment-addresses the question of the compatibility of ecologism and liberal democracy, more particularly the liberal aspects of the latter. The present article affirms and further elaborates earlier suggestions that existing approaches to this matter are either flawed or, when defensible, prone to produce trivial conclusions. Incompatibility of the two theories is always to be expected, in one form or another. It is argued that a characterization of political theories as families growing and changing over time, a notion partly derived from Wittgenstein’s family concept, allows us to understand ecologism and liberalism as evolving theories, and to anticipate the development of both-which may lead to far more surprising conclusions.


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