First Contact with Language Corpora: Perspectives from Students

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Computational Linguistics; Masters Programs; Graduate Students; Distance Education; Course Descriptions; Feedback (Response); Mastery Learning; Student Attitudes; English Literature; English for Special Purposes; Foreign Countries; Second Language Learning

Corpora are not the preserve of corpus linguists. In education, learners and teachers can analyse almost any collection of text for linguistic or non-linguistic purposes where regular reading is not efficient or feasible. This paper describes students' first contact with corpora in a distance master's degree where they are required to build a corpus on a topic of their choice and complete a short research report. Following a brief outline of the course, we turn to a description of 122 papers submitted over the last 5 years, with particular attention on the Personal Feedback sections of each among both high- and low-achievers. The opening sentences typically reveal bewilderment on initial encounter with corpus linguistics, which contrasts with growing mastery or sudden enlightenment. Further analysis of the 30k-word corpus suggests that a corpus approach may not be immediately easy, but most users can derive benefits with a little perseverance even in adverse conditions. [For the complete proceedings, see ED600837.]

As Provided

2019

ED600881