Using GOLD to Tracking L2 Development Xiaofei Lu and James Lantolf Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research Pennsylvania State University August 20, 2015

Outline Corpora and learner corpora Graphic Online Language Diagnostic (GOLD) 2

Corpora and learner corpora What is a corpus Types of corpora Learner corpus design Learner corpora and L2 development 3

What is a corpus Leech (1992): Sinclair (1991, 2004): an unexciting phenomenon, a helluva lot of text, stored on a computer Sinclair (1991, 2004): a collection of naturally-occurring language text in electronic form, selected according to external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language or language variety as a source of data for linguistic research 4

Types of corpora General-purpose vs. specialized corpora The British National Corpus Corpus del Español Synchronic vs. diachronic corpora Spoken vs. written corpora Native vs. learner corpora Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpora Spanish Learner Oral Corpus French Learner Language Oral Corpora Corpus Écrit de Français Langue Étrangère 5

Learner corpus design Purpose and type of corpus Cross-sectional vs. longitudinal Spoken vs. written Representativeness and size 6

Learner corpus design (cont.) External criteria for text selection Communicative function of the text Mode, medium, interaction, genre Encoding meaningful metadata information Learner: L1, gender, program level, discipline … Sample: date, mode, task, genre, rating … Facilitates contrastive and longitudinal studies Example: MICASE 7

Learner corpora and L2 development Samples from same students at different times Did (targeted) language development take place? Was a particular pedagogical intervention effective? Samples from different students What areas do students show different levels of development? What factors affect students’ language development? 8

Graphic Online Language Diagnostic A free online tool for teachers to assess their students’ language development Developed at CALPER, Penn State, funded by DOE Project co-directors: Xiaofei Lu and Michael McCarthy Teachers can use GOLD to Compile, upload, and manage their own corpora Share corpora with each other Search and analyze corpora Demonstration 9

Corpus compilation A user can compile a corpus by Directly compiling and uploading an XML file Using the easy-to-use guided XML creation interface An uploaded corpus can be easily managed Documents can be added or deleted The whole corpus can be deleted Content and metadata of individual documents can be easily accessed 10

Corpus sharing GOLD facilitates easy data sharing A corpus may be set to be Private, shared, or public Corpus owner may give other users right to View, add, edit, or delete corpora Demonstration 11

Basic corpus information Word count Alphabetic or numeric order Can be downloaded as a text file Corpus and document statistics Mean sentence length Mean word length Type-token ratio Demonstration 12

Corpus search Select one or more corpora to search Specify key words or phrases May use the wildcard character, e.g. book* Specify contexts Size of context window Context words and their positions Specify metadata conditions 13

Corpus search results Display of search results Demonstration Sortable KWIC display of search results Sortable graphic display of search results Demonstration 14

Lexical bundle/collocation search Procedure Select one or more corpora to search Specify search word Specify contexts Specify metadata conditions Search results Sortable list of n-grams found in selected corpora Demonstration 15

Summary of features Difference from other online tools Can create, share, and search multiple corpora Can easily search subsets of data Can work with any language Summary of corpus analysis functions Word list Corpus and document statistics: mean sentence length, mean word length, type-token ratio Corpus search and collocation search 16

Sample questions to ask With data from an individual student, one can either describe or track development in Patterns of usages of words and phrases – frequency, underuse, overuse, etc. Lexical and syntactic complexity Appropriate usage of words and phrases in context Patterns of usages of lexical bundles 17

Sample questions to ask (cont.) With data from different (groups of) students, one can compare similarities or differences among different (groups of) students in terms of Patterns of usages of words and phrases – frequency, underuse, overuse, etc. Lexical and syntactic complexity Appropriate usage of words and phrases in context Patterns of usages of lexical bundles 18