Research seminar in English linguistics: Corpora and applied linguistics [ LGERM2871 ]

LGERM 2829 : English Linguistics : Corpus Linguistics

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.

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.

The research seminar is evaluated on the basis of an oral presentation in class and an extended essay to be orally defended during the exam session.

1. an oral presentation of a scientific article that covers one of the topics of the seminar (critical analysis)
2. an extended essay written on a topic related to those covered in the seminar

Students who have more than 2 unjustified absences, who have not presented their oral communication or who have failed to hand in their extended essay will not be allowed to register for the exam.

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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.).

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