Using pedagogic corpora in ELT

Pascual Pérez-ParedesMaría Sánchez Tornel

Universidad de Murcia, Spain

CorpusCALL: Using pedagogic corpora in ELT

EUROCALL 2013 - University of Évora, Portugal20 years of EUROCALL:

Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future

Using pedagogic corpora in ELTEuroCALL Conference, 2013

1. The potential of language corpora in ELT

2. Introducing pedagogic corpora

3. Annotating pedagogy

4. Functions of the pedagogic search tool in SACODEYL & BACKBONE

5. Using the search tool for language learning: Integrating activities in

ELT (Secondary Ed. & CLIL)

6. An overview of the tools to create your own corpora (corpus

compilation, annotation and pedagogical enrichment)

7. Questions and feedback

1. The potential of language corpora in ELT


DDL = data-driven learning, i.e. learning driven by data

Data

Attested uses of language recorded in real

communicative contexts

Stored in language corpora and accessed

mainly through concordancers

From a pedagogic perspective:New learning paradigms → 21st C learning or lifelong learning

New roles & attitudes

STUDENTS

detectivesresearchers

activeresponsible

TEACHERS

guides facilitators

From a language learning-oriented perspective:

Versatility & learning potential

AUTHENTIC 4 SKILLS AWARENESS RAISING

The impact of DDL

Despite its potential benefits:

&Marginal impact in

mainstream language teaching

Limited to higher education settings

WHY???- Direct transfer of CL research methods to the classroom

- Scant knowledge of Applied Corpus Linguistics

- Lack of user-friendly DDL software

- DDL seen as DANGEROUS (Boulton, 2009)

Teachers are no longer the only owners of knowledge

Challenge to traditional teaching practices

Tertiary education Non-tertiary education0

102030405060708090

100

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Number of empirical studies (1991-2010)

CONTEXT

Source: Boulton (2010)

Scant scholarly attention in non-tertiary settings

CAUTION!

Different contexts different students with different objectives, abilities and needs

Advanced corpus users

Research purposes

Translation

L2 learning at

university

Novice corpus users

L2 learning at high school

CLIL

2. Introducing pedagogic corpora


1. Scant attention2. Learners’ profile3. Lack of resources

PEDAGOGIC CORPORA

An alternative to the direct transfer of CL

research-oriented tools and methods is

needed

INNOVATION

&

Compilation of pedagogically relevant

language data

Development of pedagogic corpus tools

PEDAGOGIC MEDIATION

Why pedagogic?

Large, general corpora

Novice users

Photo: Kordite, Flickr

Homogeneous and systematic

Thematic relevance

Recontextualisation Authentication

Easy to use query tools and search optionsBraun (2006)

Design Principles

Genuine materials, but…• small, homogeneous corpora• pedagogically relevant genres• multi-modal approach (videos, audios)• exploitation of the transcripts from different

angles (full texts, sections, concordances)

Data-based learning, but…• pedagogical annotation and selection• enrichment of the corpora (learning materials,

web resources)

support of the authentication process

communicative and exploratory teaching/learning

TaLC 2010, Brno, © 2010 J. Widmann/M. Sánchez-Tornel

EU-UMU Initiatives

• 2005 – 2008

• Video interviews in 7 EU

languages

• Teen talk

• Corpus compilation & exploitation

tools

• Learning materials

• Corpora & tools freely available

www.um.es/sacodeyl

• 2009 – 2011

• Video interviews in 6 EU

languages + English as lingua

franca

• Adult speech – professional fields

• Corpus compilation & exploitation

tools

• Learning materials

• Corpora & tools freely available

www.uni-tuebingen.de/backbone

Bambrick-Santoyo (2010) → learner-centered data-driven instruction should focus on assessment, analysis, action, and a data-driven culture

Our approach to innovation:- New model → from data to meaningful information- Data in the web 2.0 era: multimodal, searchable, exportable

and transformable- SACODEYL and BACKBONE reflect the dimensions for

educational innovation at the innovative or most innovative levels outlined by Law et al (2011):

learning objectivesstudent’s role

teacher’s roleICT use

connectedness

multiplicity of learning outcomes

3. Annotating pedagogy


• Pérez-Paredes & Alcaraz (2009)For the time being, the natural corpus playground

continues to be tertiary education. Our proposal:XML >>CL in the language classroom.

The resulting annotated corpus can be seen as being integrative of language data and annotated pedagogy. The interesting aspect here is that pedagogy can be annotated and, subsequently, accessed by corpus users.

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Linguistic analysis of interest in FLT------>Linguistics comes first------->DDL materialsConcordances and corpus

Researcher/LinguistEnd user

The possibilitiesScenario(Alcáraz and Pérez-Paredes2008)

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• Pedagogical analysis (and annotation) of language corpora

------>Pedagogy comes first

------->Pedagogy-driven

DDL

• Pedagogical analysis (and annotation) of language corpora

------>Pedagogy comes first

------->Pedagogy-driven

DDL

Material developer/Teacher/ LearnerEnd user

The feasibilityScenario(Alcáraz and Pérez-Paredes2008)

It is certainly possible to use language corpora and CL methodology in the language classroom. This possibilities scenario (Alcaraz and Pérez-Paredes, 2008) takes the research tools and methodology of the CL research paradigm straightaway to the language classroom. In other words, in the specific contexts of the language learning it seemed appropriate to do so. However, other considerations affecting pedagogic issues were simply neglected. The methodological transfer from the CL research area to the applied ring of language learning and teacher underwent noadaptation, and thus learners were presented with the same tools, corpora and analytical tasks as well-trained and professional linguists.

Pérez-Paredes, P. (2010). Corpus Linguistics and Language Education in Perspective: Appropriation and the Possibilities Scenario. In T. Harris & M. Moreno Jaén (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics in Language Teaching (pp. 53-73). Peter Lang.

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• What is BACKBONE/ SACODEYL Annotator?• How can I install BACKBONE/ SACODEYL

Annotator?• Overview

– Corpus Management– Category Management– Annotation Management– Metadata Management

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What is SACODEYL Annotator?

• SACODEYL Annotator …• Is a free and open source tool for annotating texts• Has been developed from the pedagogical perspective

(not morpho-sintactic tagging oriented)• Offers support for pedagogical annotation in texts• Supports the customization of the annotated tags

according to the necessities of the teacher.

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Annotation Aim

• Why are you annotating?• What is the purpose of your annotation?• What use are you giving to your annotation?

We assume you are annotating a text for your own students’ language learning purposes

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What is the output of SACODEYL Annotator?

• A corpus stored in XML TEI format that contains:– Texts (one text in our case)– Annotations over the text– The category tree (shared by all the texts)– Resources linked to the texts– Metadata associated to texts

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What is XML TEI format?

– TEI Text Encoding Initiative– This is a format for storing corpora– Has been promoted by OTA

(Oxford Text Archive)– Is a continuously growing format (more than 50

versions released yet, currently TEI P5)– Is rapidly spreading among the available tools

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TEI Tools (Research)

• TeiPublisher“This tool is a XML-based repository thatallows the publication of TEI corpora to thepublic community and offers a search tool.”

• Dexter“This is other annotator tool that used TEI as the format for the annotated files.”

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• Oxygen XML Editor and XMLSpy“These are XML Editors that allows the modification

of the TEI files without any limitation” (These are complex for non-advanced users)

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• TAPoR (http://portal.tapor.ca/)“The Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) is a gateway to tools for sophisticated analysis and retrieval, along with representative texts for experimentation.”

http://portal.tapor.ca/

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• WordHoard http://wordhoard.northwestern.edu/userman/index.html

“Is a tool for annotating or tagging texts by morphological, lexical, prosodic, and narratological criteria and for determining frequency information”

http://wordhoard.northwestern.edu/userman/index.html

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• XAIRAXAIRA (XML Aware Information Retrieval Architecture) is an open source tool for constructing high-quality linguistically-motivated search interfaces to large collections of XML documents.

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• The XAIRA search with our SACODEYL corpus!!!!

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Discussion and debate

• Pedagogical annotation vs. Morphological tagging paradigm

• Learner-centered vs. Researcher-oriented• Indirect applications of language corpora vs.

Direct applications• Constraints of traditional CL in the language

classroom

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Discussion and debate

• Cognitive demands of traditional CL in the language classroom: learner as a reseacher and as a traveller

• Is CL an extra hassle in language classrooms? (Mauranen 2004)

• Customization of language corpus/collection of texts• Mediation role of corpus-based resources in the FLT

classroom• Authenticity issues (Widdowson)

4. Functions of the pedagogic search tool in SACODEYL & BACKBONE


The main learning space

Access to corpora + learning materials

Four search modes: - Browse

- Section search- Concordances- Co-occurrences

Wordlists

The browse mode

The section search mode

The co-occurrences search mode

The concordances search mode

The word lists view

Moodle integration

5. Using the search tool for language learning: Integrating activities in ELT (Secondary Ed. &

CLIL)


-Learning packages

http://sacodeyl.inf.um.es/sacodeyl-search2/faces/corpora/resources/EnglishCorpus_packages.html

-Exploratory activities

http://sacodeyl.inf.um.es/sacodeyl-search2/faces/corpora/resources/EnglishCorpus_exploratory.html



6. An overview of the tools to create your own corpora (corpus compilation, annotation and

pedagogical enrichment)


http://www.um.es/backbone/tutorials/annotator/

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What categories does this defaultcategory tree contain ?

TopicsGrammaticalLexicalStyleCEF Level….

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How can I add a new document to the current corpus?

1. Press in …

2. Select the text format/encoding

3. Select the new document

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What does the text format mean?

• This is the manner in which the text is laid out in the file.

• Mainly 3 text formats are supported:– Plain text (written) .txt– Oral text in SACODEYL Transcriptor format– XML text in TEI standard format (text in special XML files)

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This is the form in which the text is stored (related to the Multilanguage).

(In Windows ANSI by default)

What does the text encoding mean?

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Adding our example

• Our example file is en17.txt– This file has a SACODEYL Transcriptor

format– Has been encoded with multilingual

support encoding format (UTF-16)• Save the changes!!!!

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Selecting the text to work with

• Now we can insert a great amount of texts in the same corpus.

• We can select one and annotate it.

1. Press …

2. Select the document

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Friendly Appearance

• Pedagogical orientation

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Information showed in the working document

• Section Number• Applied Categories to this section

(Annotations)• Speaker (only in oral text)• Transcription

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What is a section?

• Is a stretch of text that is pedagogically motivated.• A fragment that could be useful in a classroom• A section can be established in any kind of text (oral

and written) with the insertion of the special char (#) for division of texts into sections.

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Intuitive Annotation Process

• Drag and Drop to Annotate a Section

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Keywords

• SACODEYL Annotator supports the annotation of keywords at any kind of level

• Just select text and apply a category by right-clicking

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What is a Keyword?

• “… [a] keyword is a stretch of language (a word, more than one word or a whole paragraph) that the annotator associates to a category…”

Pérez-Paredes and Alcaraz, ReCALL, Jan. 2009 Vol 21. (1) (Forthcoming)

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Selective View

• Offers a selective view of the information in order to facilitate the organization.

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Annotating a Title

• Drag and Drop the special “Title” category to the desired section.

• The title is rendered by a tool tip when placing the cursor on

the section. (No tool tip = No title)

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Multilanguage

• Supports a real multilingual annotation• May use texts in any language

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Extensible

• Supports customization of the annotation

• User can add his/her own annotation taxonomy or remove any annotation category

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How can I add a new category?

– Select the parent category. (i.e. Topics)

– Press Add Cat. Button.– Fill the dialog

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How can I remove a category?

Select the category to remove (i.e. Topic)

Be careful …All the associated children will

be removed alsoAll the annotation with the tags

will be removed alsoPress Delete Cat. Button.

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How can I reorder the categories?

Select the category to reorder (i.e. Topic)

Press Up Cat or Down Cat. to move it.

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How can I customize a category?Select the category to

customize (i.e. Topic)Press double click

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Can I manage metadata for the working text?

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What if I find mistakes?

• Supports edition of the inserted texts.• Uses XML TEI standard for encoding corpora.

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Multilingual Interface

• Available in many languages• You could also add your language for the

interfaces

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Integration

• SACODEYL Annotator has been integrated with:– SACODEYL Transcriptor– SACODEYL Search – SACODEYL VRP

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Resource Management

• Offers enrichment of text with external resources

• i.e. html links, videos, audios, etc.

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Where is the information stored?

• Remember: All the information is store in one file. The corpus file which you have created.

Corpus

LanguageData

Annotation

Language

Metadata

Pedagogy

Pascual Pérez-Paredes [email protected]ía Sánchez Tornel [email protected]

Universidad de Murcia, Spain

CorpusCALL: Using pedagogic corpora in ELT

EUROCALL 2013 - University of Évora, Portugal20 years of EUROCALL:

Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future

Using pedagogic corpora in ELT

Education

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