SCoRE: A learner-friendly corpus and software

Michael H. BrownKanda Institute of Foreign Languagesbrown-ma@kifl.ac.jp

Outline

1. Key terms and background2. SCoRE tools3. How my students and I used SCoRE4. How my students felt about SCoRE5. Points for consideration

Corpora and Data-driven Learning

Corpus: A searchable database of systematically collected

language data (i.e. texts).

Data-driven Learning (DDL): Learners accessing and

exploiting the data found in corpora for learning purposes.

Guided Induction

1. Illustrations: looking at data

2. Interaction: discussing observations

3. Intervention: providing guides or hints

4. Induction: making/describing one’s own ‘rule’

(Flowerdew, 2009)

SCoRE

● SCoRE is the Sentence

Corpus of Remedial English.

● It is a collection of over

10,000 English sentences

featuring selected grammar

patterns.

● The English sentences are

paired with 10,000

Japanese sentences.

● It is primarily for Japanese

learners of English.

(Chujo et al., 2015)

Figure 1

SCoRE En

Home

Figure 2 SCoRE En Pattern Browser

Figure 3 SCoRE En Concordancer

Figure 4

SCoRE Ja

Home

Figure 5 SCoRE Ja Pattern Browser

Figure 6 SCoRE Ja Concordancer

Figure 7 SCoRE Ja Problem Generator

Figure 8 SCoRE Ja Problems

Using SCoRE

- In an earlier study, SCoRE was used to teach grammar patterns from a

coursebook (Brown, 2017).

- The coursebook lent itself to a PPP approach to grammar instruction.

- SCoRE-assisted guided induction activities were used in place of the

coursebook for several explicit grammar patterns.

- Students generally found the software easy to use, and many believed

that this approach helped them more than the PPP approach.

Using SCoRE, cont.

- The present study involved using SCoRE as a supplementary resource

for addressing a) grammatical constructions that students were having

trouble grasping and b) common and reoccurring errors.

- The instructional approach was again Guided Induction.

- At the end of the term, students completed a survey on their feelings

and reactions to using SCoRE and Guided Induction.

Guided Induction Example

- The use of “almost people”, as in, “I think almost people like sports” is a

common, reoccurring error.

- Students looked up almost using the SCoRE concordance tool.

- They filled in a worksheet that was designed to guide them in noticing

particular features of how almost is used.

- The guidance given was intended to help students themselves inductively

reason that almost everyone is the phrasing they probably want to use.

Survey (n=74)

Completely

disagree

Mostly

disagree

Disagree a

little

Agree a little Mostly agree Completely

agree

SCoRE was

easy to use

2 3 3 33 22 11

I know how to

use the

concordancer

well

1 4 1 19 48 1

I know how to

use the

P.B.well

2 6 4 33 25 4

Survey (n=74)

Completely

disagree

Mostly

disagree

Disagree a

little

Agree a little Mostly agree Completely

agree

The SCoRE

worksheets were

helpful

0 3 6 7 52 6

The SCoRE

worksheets were

clear

2 6 6 26 30 4

The SCoRE

worksheets were

challenging

0 1 9 13 46 5

Survey (n=74)

Completely

disagree

Mostly

disagree

Disagree a

little

Agree a little Mostly

agree

Completely

agree

The SCoRE activities

improved my

grammar

understanding

0 2 7 7 52 6

I prefer the bilingual

version of SCoRE

0 0 14 39 14 7

I would like it if

SCoRE were used in

other classes

0 3 16 37 26 2

Points for considerations

- SCoRE is simple to use.

- Students’ perceptions are that it is helpful.

- In my perception, familiarity with SCoRE and the Guided Induction activities was

important. That is, students seemed to like them more as they became more

familiar with them.

HOWEVER

- There was no instrument for clearly disentangling perceptions of SCoRE itself

from the approach (Guided Induction).

- In discussions, students mentioned software issues with the Problem

Generator (e.g. misaligned sentence pairs), as well as frustration that there is

only one ‘correct answer’ and so sometimes legitimate answers are marked as

References

Brown, M.H. (2017). “Using the Sentence Corpus of Remedial English to Introduce Data-Driven Learning Tasks”, Kanda Academic Review, 1(1), 1-4.

Chujo, K., Oghigian, K. and Akasegawa, S. (2015). “A corpus and grammatical browsing system for remedial EFL learners,” In A. Leńko-Szymańska and A. Boulton (eds.), Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven Learning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 109-128.

Flowerdew, L. (2009). “Applying corpus linguistics to pedagogy: A critical evaluation”.

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(3), 393-417.

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The Sentence Corpus of Remedial English can be found at:

www.score-corpus.org (Japanese)

www.score-corpus.org/en (English)

These slides will be made available via my Twitter @Za_Maikeru

And via my corpus linguistics blog: https://corpling4efl.wordpress.com

Thank you for listening.