Shona Whyte has written three excellent summary-and-reaction pieces about plenaries at the recent 13th Teaching and Language Corpora conference held at Cambridge University. The first plenary is from Susan Hunston and covers Pattern Grammar. The second is from Anne O’Keeffe and is about the interface between DDL and SLA. The third, from Alex Boulton, provides an overview of the state of DDL research. Slides for all of them, a fourth plenary by Costas Gabrielatos, and several other presentations can be found in the TaLC Conference Program.     ..read more

  **Update** The audio did not turn out very well . Oh well. If you have any questions or would like me to explain the flow/transition between some of the slides, please get in touch. I will be submitting a paper for the conference proceedings, so that should help clarify anything that is not terribly clear just from reading the slides. This is my presentation at JALT PanSIG on May, 19th. I will be audio recording myself as well, and if the quality is decent, I will post the audio later ..read more

The BYU Corpora bank, which of course includes COCA, has added a new, 14 billion word corpus. I haven’t looked at it in detail yet, but it seems to have a lot of useful new search features. There is an overview here: https://corpus.byu.edu/iweb/help/iweb_overview.pdf. I may update this note later after I’ve played with the interface a bit more.   ..read more

Last year saw the publication of the first large meta-analysis of DDL (Boulton & Cobb, 2017) and it had generally positive findings for the field; for example (emphasis added): Focusing only on the most robust results (i.e., MVs with at least 10 unique samples in both P/P and C/E designs), 70% had large effects, 25% medium, and only 5% small or negligible. The most consistent large effects showed that DDL is perhaps most appropriate in foreign language contexts for undergraduates as much as graduates, for intermediate levels as much as advanced, for general as much as specific/academic pu ..read more

A multilingual (CfP in 5 languages) conference on DDL will be held on September 27-28 in Torino, Italy. The conference website is available here, and the CfP can be downloaded from this page. This is an excerpt from the English CfP (bold emphasis in the original): Researchers and teachers are invited to submit proposals discussing theoretical implications and practical applications of DDL in foreign language classes and in CLIL contexts. Since one of the aims of the Conference is to reach out to the teachers in primary and secondary education, participants are also invited to deliver practica ..read more

Russ Mayne wrote an interesting post a few days ago on the constructions “my wife and I” and “me and my wife”. I fully agree with him regarding the ‘correctness’ of either construction and the main thrust of his post, but I did have a thought about one very specific part of his post. Here is the pertinent part of Russ’ post: The words ‘Me and my wife’ are in the subject position (at the start of the sentence) and so we should use the subject pronoun ‘I’  English sentences usually start with subjects. so in ‘I love you’, I is the subject. If it were the object&nbs ..read more

If you work with or read about corpora, you are probably familiar with Sketch Engine. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is described on its own website as “the ultimate corpus tool”, and that’s maybe not an exaggeration. You can do a ton of cool stuff with it. Sketch Engine also provides access to hundreds of ready-to-use corpora in close to a hundred languages. However, it requires a subscription (although a 30-day trial is available for starters). This puts some people off from it; after all, there are a lot of free resources out there. What some people may not realize, though, is that ..read more

This is a great little explainer from Warren M. Tang. It covers the basics of the basics, and provides ready-to-use definitions and descriptions. He has also got a straightforward glossary of corpus types. I get questions from colleagues about the basics of corpora sometimes, and I’m always happy to find simple reference materials that can help them out just in case my explanations aren’t clear or head off on a tangent ..read more

UPDATE: If the slides are not appearing properly below, they can be seen here. UPDATE 2: I noticed that the bottom of slide #20 has been cut off. The ending of that sentence should be “… are marked as being incorrect.” These are my slides from a presentation I gave at the JALT International Conference in Tsukuba, Japan. I talked about using SCoRE with my students and their reactions to it (and toward guided induction activities). The main points were that my students felt SCoRE was a simple-to-use tool; and they liked it although it was hard to differentiate their feelings toward SCoRE itself ..read more

In addition to the burst of recent research articles, there are a couple journals putting out CfPs for corpora-related topics. JCADS is the Journal of Corpora & Discourse Studies. It’s new and will be publishing its first issue in the summer of 2018. The prior link is to the CfP posted on Facebook, submission info is here. Études en Didactique des Langues (EDL) will publish a special issue on didactic (instructional) uses of corpora. The link is to a French-language page, but if you don’t read French, don’t worry, you can find a PDF of the CfP in both French and English in the list of ..read more