Compiling and Analyzing Your Own Learner Corpus Xiaofei Lu CALPER 2012 Summer Workshop July 17, 2012

2 Agenda Sample teaching- and research-oriented corpus projects Learner corpus project lab

3 General questions teachers may ask 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?

4 More concrete questions Frequency of usage: Are my students using X? How many of them are using X? How often? How many are not using X? Accuracy: Are they using X appropriately? What difficulties exist? Function, diversity: Are they using X in diverse ways for diverse purposes? Are new usages emerging? Is there evidence of improvement over time? Did intervention help?

5 L2 Chinese Written Corpus in GOLD (teaching/research) Corpus overview  Data, metadata, word segmentation, compilation Frequency list  What English words are used in writing in Chinese? Sample structures of interest  CALPERLEX on le 了, the perfective aspectual marker CALPERLEX on le 了  Learner errors concerning the ba 把 construction 得 as infix (position 2, length 4) Numeral classifiers (Zhang & Lu, under review)

6 Spanish OPI Corpus in GOLD (research) Corpus overview  Data, metadata, compilation Data Distribution and discourse functions of pragmatic markers pues and bueno between “full” and “fail” groups (Lu, Julieta & Appel, under review)  Frequency of use [statistical analysis]  Discourse functions [qualitative analysis + statistical analysis]

7 Kibbitzers (teaching/research) MICASE Kibbitzers  Check out hyperboles, among or betweenhyperbolesamong or between Tim John’s Kibbitzers Tim John’s Kibbitzers  Check out Kibbitzer 21: reason to v. reason forKibbitzer 21 More CALPERLEX entries

8 More sample research projects Granger (2003): Error-tagged learner corpora and CALL (Error annotation and AntConc style analysis) Granger (2003) Reinhardt (2010): Directives in office hour consultations (MICASE & AntConc style analysis) Reinhardt (2010) Lu (2011, 2012): Lexical and syntactic complexity analysis (learner corpus and computational analysis) Lexical and syntactic complexity analysis Crossley & McNamara (2009): Lexical differences in L1 & L2 writing (ICLE & Coh-Metrix) Crossley & McNamara (2009) What other/similar projects can you envisage? More projects: MICASE-based, LINDSEI-based, UCL CECL teamMICASE-basedLINDSEI-basedUCL CECL team

9 Learner corpus project lab Compilation and annotation  Compile a learner corpus with relevant metadata (or use this dataset)this dataset  Perform one (or more) specific, useful type(s) of annotation of interest to you on (a good part of) the corpus  Keep a version of your (partially) annotated corpus for analysis using AntConc and/or other tools (how would you organize it?)  Format the corpus for GOLD and upload it there Exploration  Explore your corpus and its annotations using GOLD and/or AntConc  Identify a few potential areas for analysis (e.g., for assessing/comparing/understanding student performance/progress/challenges) Think about pedagogy, assessment, and/or research

10 Learner corpus project lab Analysis  Use GOLD, AntConc and/or other tools to perform quantitative and/or qualitative analyses of your corpus  Use a reference (native, expert) corpus for comparative purposes if necessary  Document results of your analysis