Beyond concordancing: Multiple affordances of corpora in university language degrees.

Alex Boulton (1, 2)

1 CRAPEL - Centre de Recherches et d'Applications Pédagogiques en Langues
2 ATILF - Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française

The advent of electronic corpora has had a dramatic impact in many fields, and it has even been suggested that language learners may benefit from direct corpus consultation. However, there is scepticism in some quarters that the advantages might not justify the investment in terms of time and effort in mastering the relevant tools for techniques which are themselves tedious, mechanical and time-consuming. Nonetheless, the multiple affordances of a corpus approach provide reason to think the investment might have larger pay-offs than often realised: familiarity with corpora can be applied across sub-disciplines in many if not all courses in a typical university degree in language. Further, learners can start using corpora productively even with minimal training in distance education, quickly going beyond simple concordancing. The students in this study are enrolled in a translation course in the third year of a degree in English at a French distance education centre. While corpora are widely used in translation teaching, this often involves the compilation of specific parallel corpora by the students. In this course, students have no prior experience of corpus use and are expected only to work only with freely available on-line monolingual corpora of contemporary English, thus enabling them to work immediately. The simple interface provided by Mark Davies (http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/personal/) to large corpora of British (100 million words) and American (400 million words) English is widely used for such purposes, with over two thirds of all users declaring their primary interest as language learning, teaching or translation. The sites are easy for novice users to navigate and are accompanied by tutorials and help features: this is highly desirable in the distance teaching context where face-to-face input is not an option, and means that the course itself can keep the introduction to the basic concepts and techniques to a minimum. After that, the constraints of the distance context play to the strengths of constructivism as the students explore the corpora on their own; though email contact with the teacher is possible, and there are discussion forums to facilitate peer-to-peer collaboration, these are generally under-used. Results are presented from the 2-hour on-line exams where the methodology section requires the students to demonstrate and explain their use of corpora in translating a given text. Comparing data from two sessions shows how the students come to grips with corpora for translation, and allows a qualitative analysis of individual performance on the various techniques used with greater of lesser success. These data are backed up by questionnaires submitted after each exam session to gain feedback from both successful and less successful students. Particular attention is accorded to corpus use beyond the usual concordance lines, including frequencies, register distributions, collocates lists, word comparisons, and so on, which allow the learner to ask not just 'can I say this', but 'is this appropriate'.

Domaines: Linguistique

Alex Boulton. Beyond concordancing: Multiple affordances of corpora in university language degrees.. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2012, 34, pp.33-38. ⟨hal-00502633⟩