UCL - Research seminar in English linguistics: Corpora and applied linguistics

[GERM2871]

[15h] 5 credits

This course is taught in the 2d semester.

Teacher(s): Sylviane Granger

Language: English

Level: Second

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

At the end of the seminar, students should be able to show insight into the use of corpora in different areas of applied linguistics. They should be familiar with the various corpora and methodologies that are available and should be aware of the advantages and limitations each of them presents in a particular context.

Main themes

Corpora, viz. electronic collections of spoken and written data, are playing an ever increasing role in a large number of applied linguistics areas. In this seminar we will examine how applied linguistics has benefited from the use of corpora, in areas such as:

language and its acquisition.
language and assessment.
language and instruction.
language and society.
language and technology.
language and translation.
language for specific purposes.

Content will vary according to students' interests. A wide range of corpora will be used (native corpora of speech and writing, learner corpora, multilingual corpora) and different corpus approaches will be compared and contrasted with more experimental methods such as elicitation techniques.

Content and teaching methods

The seminar deals with the integration of corpus data in different applied linguistics areas via lectures, reading of scientific articles, group presentations and discussions.
In 2009-2010, the course will focus on the use of corpora in multilingual studies. The following topics will be covered :
- contrastive linguistics and corpus studies;
- corpus use in translation studies;
- range of multilingual corpora and software tools;
- studies of lexis and grammar based on multilingual corpora;
- applications of multilingual corpus studies (materials design, teaching, etc.).

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Course prerequisite: GERM 2825: English linguistics: corpus linguistics

The evaluation will be partly based on students' active involvement in the seminar. It will also involve an oral presentation and/or an extended essay on a topic of their choice in relation to the themes of the seminar.