In June I had the pleasure to attend the IVACS 9th Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies International Biennial Conference 2018 hosted by the Centre for English Language Proficiency at the University of Malta. And while Malta was a great location, with lovely beaches, and buildings, and food, what I was really there for was the conference. It did not disappoint.
It was extensive, with over 104 talks, and centred on corpus studies, with many researchers focusing on the value of corpora for language teaching, language teachers and language learners. As a Senior ELT Research Manager at Cambridge, and a corpus linguist, it was a great opportunity to catch up on what is happening in the field, and more importantly, to find useful research to help inform my work at Cambridge University Press, which centres on creating research informed ELT materials.
IVACS 2018 Conference
There were so many interesting talks, and I couldn’t possibly go into detail on them all. But you can get the IVACS 2018 Conference Programme to find out who was there and what they were talking about. But I thought for this short post, I would talk about some of the plenaries, a few talks I thought were valuable for ELT, and give a little information on my own talk that I gave.
The conference had three great plenary speakers and each one centred on a different area of corpus linguistics, and offered something different and insightful from the field:
- Dr Robbie Love, School of Education, University of Leeds
- Ute Römer, Department of Applied Linguistics and English as a Second Language, Georgia State University
- Dr Rachelle Vessey, Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London
The plenary speakers
Love’s talk centred on the Spoken BNC2014, a large spoken corpus that he built with Lancaster University, and us, here at Cambridge University Press. I won’t go into detail on the corpus, but we do have a post about it here. His talk focused on the challenges of building such a database, and illustrated the power of the corpus in giving us insights into the language of spoken conversation. The data as he described it, though not without its problems, is rich with different demographics of age, location, and topics of conversation. With such means of filtering the language, we can see how valuable the corpus can be for ELT when teaching spoken language for the real world.
In the second plenary, Römer went into more specific studies of language, focusing on verb-argument constructions, and the patterns in language and learner language that illustrate how we use grammar. Her talk was fascinating and showed how, when you dive into the rabbit hole of corpus linguistics, we can see some really interesting patterns – albeit complex!
The final plenary was by Dr Rachelle Vessey, and for any sociolinguists out there, this was a real treat. She spoke about the conceptualisation of communities and how that informs the way we classify speakers and therefore construct corpora. Her talk made me think about the focus on native speaker language in ELT and how corpora compiled only of native speakers may not really be representative of the current state of the language. With more and more non-native speaker teachers in the world, what is more pertinent is a focus on expert speakers and users of English, a factor we have long considered in the construction of the Cambridge English Corpus. So it was really enjoyable to see these issues coming up.
Other research talks
Beyond the plenaries there were myriad talks to attend on different aspects of teaching and learning. Some focused on teacher training like “A Corpus-Based Analysis of Social Interaction in LTE Contexts” by Fiona Farr, Angela Farrell & Elaine Riordan of the University of Limerick. Their talk looked at a corpus of teacher education they have built which draws on teacher feedback, observations, reflections, discussions, blogs and many more written and spoken elements. With it, they propose its value for teacher training, by looking at the language of experienced teachers, for example, when they are reflecting on their lesson. This can illustrate the kinds of things experienced teachers focus on and help inform teacher training programmes, to guide novice teachers towards more effective reflections.
Others such as “A Corpus-Aided Comparative Analysis of Native and Non-Native Speaking English Language Teachers’ Approaches to In-Class Spoken Feedback” by Jane Seely, of MIC, looked at teacher discourse, and how in practice, teachers deal with corrective feedback. This sheds light on the challenges of issuing effective feedback in the ELT classroom and offers insight into how, linguistically, teacher talk can be used to effectively facilitate learning through correction.
Language of academic discourse
My own talk centred on studying the language of academic discourse, and how this can differ across languages. When I was teaching writing at university, I often had students from different backgrounds and L1s who found it challenging to write in English, academically at least. Sometimes they would write things I thought a little odd, like using proverbs in introductions or having sentences that ran on for lines and lines. When I looked into this, I found that there was often an interference from their L1 academic writing generic conventions.
So for my study, I analysed research articles in English, French and Spanish to see how we engage and include the reader in the texts in all three languages. I wanted to know if we really do it differently. What I found was that we can do it quite differently, with a focus on different questions and pronouns to not only engage readers, but to include them in your argument and effectively convince them of your opinion. How we do this can vary across languages as some languages, like English, tend to focus on reader quite a lot. This idea of argumentation is not new by any means, but looking at how it can differ across languages is useful and is rarely considered. With this information, we can see that students would be able to change their writing to meet the expectations of their audiences, something as writers, we must always do.
Overall, the conference was very informative and had a lot of variety and diversity in its talks and others like Julie Moore have written about it on their blogs so if you want to see more, you should check that out. The conference also had a lot of activity on Twitter @IVACS2018, so you can find out more there too. I’ll be sharing a few more blogs on recent conferences I attended or presented at, but for now I’ll leave you with my main take away.
Main take away
The value of corpus linguistics for language learning is clear. What is important is to maintain the appropriate academic rigor to ensure that the results we glean from research are valid, honest, and applied critically. There are many people using corpora to study language and many people working on developing language learning materials. How these two overlap however, is not always clear. From my perspective, attending conferences such as IVACS2018 is valuable as it allows us to interact with active research on language and learning, and funnel that knowledge from theory to practice.
Why not take a look at Niall’s previous blog on On Speaking: Creating a safe speaking environment or check out his twitter @niallcurry for more content.