1. 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

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

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

4. 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

5. 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

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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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