This paper adopts a construction grammar approach to test the efficiency of data‐driven learning (DDL) when applied to constructions. High‐intermediate learners of English as a foreign language took ...part in an experiment consisting, for each construction, in (i) a pre‐test, in which the learners had to produce as many sentences as possible illustrating the constructions, (ii) a DDL intervention, which involved various concordance‐based activities, and (iii) several post‐tests, similar to the pre‐test, performed at regular intervals. The analysis looks at the number of (valid and invalid) constructions produced as well as the native‐like nature of these constructions, as established through a comparison with native corpus data. The analysis also examines the evolution of these results over the different post‐tests. Finally, it considers learners’ attitudes towards the DDL interventions, as evaluated through a questionnaire.
RESUME
Cet article adopte l'approche de la grammaire de construction pour tester l'efficacité de l'apprentissage sur corpus (data‐driven learning) lorsqu'il est appliqué à des constructions. L'expérience, à laquelle participaient des apprenants d'anglais langue étrangère de niveau intermédiaire supérieur, consistait, pour chaque construction, à (i) produire autant de phrases que possible illustrant les constructions (pré‐test), (ii) accomplir diverses tâches basées sur des concordances, et (iii) effectuer plusieurs post‐tests, similaires au pré‐test, à intervalles réguliers. L'analyse porte sur le nombre de constructions produites (valables et non valables) ainsi que sur le degré de ressemblance de ces constructions avec les données d'un corpus natif. Ces résultats sont également comparés au cours des différents post‐tests. Enfin, on examine, sur base d'un questionnaire, les attitudes des apprenants à l’égard de l'apprentissage sur corpus.
Second-hand consumption is often seen as a way of reducing one’s ecological footprint. In an attempt to find out how the representations of second-hand consumption in discourse have evolved over ...time, a corpus study of the word
is carried out on the basis of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (1820–2019). Frequency is considered, as well as collocates, which show the types of second-hand items that are mentioned in different time periods and which indicate how positively or negatively connoted second-hand consumption is. Together with a more qualitative approach, this analysis reveals variation in the frequency and connotations of the word
, and some long-lasting stigma which survives for example through comparisons. The article ends with some suggestions as to how the image of second-hand consumption could be improved.
Different methods and sources of information have been proposed in the literature to study the processing of language and, in particular, instances of formulaic language such as multiword units. This ...article explores the possibility of using pause placement in writing process data to determine the likelihood that a multiword unit is processed as a whole in the mind. The data are texts produced by learners of English and corresponding keylog files from the Process Corpus of English in Education (PROCEED). N-grams are selected on the basis of the finished texts and retrieved from the keylogging data. The pause placement patterns of these n-grams are coded and serve as a basis to compute the Pause Placement and Processing (PPP) score. This score relies on the assumption that n-grams which are delineated but not interrupted by pauses (hence taking the form of ‘bursts of writing’) are more likely to be processed holistically. The PPP score points to structurally complete n-grams such as in fact and first of all as being more likely to be processed holistically than structurally incomplete n-grams such as that we and to the. While the results are plausible and can be further substantiated by characteristics of specific n-grams, it is acknowledged that additional effects might also be at work to explain the results obtained.
Abstract
This paper examines the use of online writing tools by French-speaking learners of English based on the analysis of screen recordings of a free composition task that come from the Process ...Corpus of English in Education, a process corpus of learner writing. The study charts learners’ use of online resources by investigating how often learners resort to tools, which tools they use, and what effect the use of tools has on their texts. Results show considerable individual variation in the extent to which learners use online tools and a general propensity to rely on a limited range of tool types, most often bilingual tools. Overall, the use of tools helps learners improve their texts, but a close examination of their consultation behaviour also reveals shortcomings in learners’ strategies, such as a tendency to carry out single-word searches or a lack of critical thinking about the information that tools provide.
Honorary editor: René Dirven The series Applications of Cognitive Linguistics (ACL) welcomes book proposals from any domain where the theoretical insights developed in Cognitive Linguistics (CL) have ...been (or could be) fruitfully applied. In the past thirty-five years, the CL movement has articulated a rich and satisfying view of language around a small number of foundational principles. The first one argues that language faculties do not constitute a separate module of cognition, but emerge as specialized uses of more general cognitive abilities. The second principle emphasises the symbolic function of language. The grammar of individual languages (including the lexicon, morphology, and syntax) can be exclusively described as a structured inventory of conventionalized symbolic units. The third principle states that meaning is equated with conceptualization. It is subjective, anthropomorphic, and crucially incorporates humans' experience with their bodies and the world around them. Finally, CL's Usage-Based conception anchors the meaning of linguistic expressions in the rich soil of their social usage. Consequently, usage-related issues such as frequency and entrenchment contribute to their semantic import. Taken together, these principles provide researchers in different academic fields with a powerful theoretical framework for the investigation of linguistic issues in the specific context of their particular disciplines. The primary focus of ACL is to serve as a high level forum for the result of these investigations.
This article deals with the place of learner corpora, i.e. corpora containing authentic language data produced by learners of a foreign/second language, in English for academic purposes (EAP) ...pedagogy and sets out to demonstrate that they have a valuable contribution to make to the field. Following an initial brief introduction to corpus-based analyses of academic writing, the article zooms in on learner corpora, describing some of the findings that emerge from corpus studies of L2 learners’ EAP writing. The next section examines the use of corpora in EAP materials design and shows that the few existing corpus-informed EAP tools tend to be based on native corpora only. The article then reports on a collaborative corpus-based project between the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (Université catholique de Louvain) and Macmillan Education, which aims to describe a number of rhetorical functions particularly prominent in academic writing. The analysis of learner corpus data and their comparison with data from native corpora have highlighted a number of problems which non-native learners experience when writing academic essays, e.g., lack of register awareness, phraseological infelicities, and semantic misuse. In this article, we illustrate how these findings were used to inform a 30-page academic writing section in the second edition of the
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.
The papers brought together in this volume explore, through corpus data, the link between contrastive and interlanguage analysis. Learner corpora are approached from a contrastive perspective, by ...comparing them with native corpora or corpus data produced by learners from other mother tongue backgrounds, or by combining them with contrastive data from multilingual (translation or comparable) corpora. The integration of these two frameworks, contrastive and learner corpus research, makes it possible to highlight crucial aspects of learner production, such as features of non-nativeness (errors, over- and underuse, unidiomatic expressions), including universal features of interlanguage, or more general issues like the question of transfer. The ten papers of this volume cover topics ranging from methodology to syntax (e.g. adverb placement, postverbal subjects), through lexis (collocations) and discourse (e.g. information packaging, thematic choice). The languages examined include English, Chinese, Dutch, French and Spanish. The book will be of interest to a wide array of readers, especially researchers in second language acquisition and contrastive linguistics, but also professionals working in foreign language teaching, such as language teachers, materials writers and language testers.
The Process Corpus of English in Education (PROCEED) is a learner corpus of English which, in addition to written texts, consists of data that make the writing process visible in the form of ...keystroke log files and screencast videos. It comes with rich metadata about each learner, among which indices of exposure to the target language and cognitive measures such as working memory or fluid intelligence. It also includes an L1 component which is made up of similar data produced by the learners in their mother tongue. PROCEED opens new perspectives in the study of learner writing, by going beyond the written product. It makes it possible to investigate aspects such as writing fluency, use of online resources, cognitive phenomena like automaticity and avoidance, or theoretical modelling of the writing process. It also has applications for teaching, e.g. by showing students screencast video clips from the corpus illustrating effective writing strategies, as well as for testing, e.g. by establishing a corpus-derived standard of writing fluency for learners at a certain proficiency level.
This paper looks at the ways of refining the technique of collostructional analysis, and more precisely multiple distinctive collexeme analysis, by taking word senses into account. It presents the ...main results of a sense-based multiple distinctive collexeme analysis of the non-finite verb slot of English periphrastic causative constructions and shows how these results compare with those of a lemma-based analysis of the same data. The study reveals that the different senses of a verb tend to be attracted to different constructions and that integrating sense into the analysis not only makes the interpretation of the data more straightforward and more reliable, but also provides information that would otherwise have to be obtained by means of other techniques.
Individual speakers vary considerably in their rate of speech, their syntactic choices, and the organisation of information in their discourse. This study, based on a corpus of monologue productions ...from native and non-native speakers of English and French, examines the relations between temporal fluency, syntactic complexity and informational content. The purpose is to identify which features, or combinations of features, are common to more fluent speakers, and which are more idiosyncratic in nature. While the syntax of fluent speakers is not necessarily more complex than that of less fluent speakers, it is suggested that they are able to deliver content more efficiently through a combination of less hesitant speech and of lexical and syntactic choices that allow them to package information more economically.
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