LING 45000 - Corpus Linguistics

This course equips language teachers to use corpus linguistics to inform their teaching and/or bring corpus linguistics into the second/foreign language classroom. Non-TENL students are welcome and the course can be adjusted to fit their needs, as well. (Namely, an alternative to the mini-lesson requirement can be offered, and the corpus of such students can consist of any text or transcribed speech in any language). No experience with corpus linguistics, programming or statistics is assumed. The first half is an overview of corpus linguistics (history, tools, methods, corpora). The second half covers the relevance of corpus methods for language teaching and linguistics research in general. You will walk away with from this class with your own mini-corpus that you may build on in the future.

Graduate students read primary sources (in addition to the course readings) and are expected to be especially mindful of theoretical and methodological considerations behind corpus-building and corpus linguistics (in the readings and regarding their own corpus), and to express their understanding of these considerations orally and in writing.

Preparation for Course
P: LING 10300 or 30300 (or equivalent).

Cr. 3.
Notes
Crosslisted with LING 55000 for graduate students.
Student Learning Outcomes
1.Students will learn basic terms/concepts in corpus linguistics, how to a build a corpus in a principled way, what kinds of corpora and corpus tools are available, and how the basics of how to use those tools. The degree to which students achieve these outcomes will be assessed via the in-class exam (taken mid-way through the course); the quality of the personal mini-corpus students build; their justification for their corpus-building and methodological decisions (as expressed in the explicit, rationale they must provide for both the corpus and the final project); the quality of their final project; and by (for graduate students) their critical assessment of primary literature both in writing and orally.
2.Students will learn to use corpus analysis to support student learning in a language classroom (TENL option) and/or as the basis of original research (non-TENL option). The degree to which students achieve these outcomes will be assessed via the quality of their final project, which requires them to do precisely this.
3.Students will learn to think critically about corpus-based language lessons and/or research, addressing issues such as data suitability or methodological flaws. The degree to which students achieve these outcomes will be assessed using methods already mentioned: For both graduate and undergraduate students, their written rationales (for the corpus and for the final project) will be essential in determining if they have mastered this aspect of the course, as will their contributions to class discussions (particularly in the latter half of the course). Graduate students will also be assessed based on the soundness of their critical assessement of primary literature (in the annotated bibliography).