Assignments

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Assignment 1.  Assessment of an aspect of pedagogical grammar

For the first assignment you take a pedadogical description of some aspect of English in a ESL/EFL text and carry out a corpus analysis to determine to what extent the pedagogical description accurately represents the situation as revealed by your corpus analysis.

    For this assignment you will:
        select the pedagogical description of language usage
        locate a suitable corpus to analyse
        analyse the usage in the corpus
        assess how successful your analysis was (in terms of precision and recall)
        compare the corpus findings with the textbook description
        discuss reasons for any discrepancy
        discuss how you might improve the pedagogical description based on your findings

We will perform an exercise similar to this in one of the lab sessions.

Due:  April 11

Assignment 2.  Corpus Linguistics paper

Length 2000-2500 Words

In marking the paper I will be looking for:

    •  control over the terms and concepts in corpus linguistics
     • evidence of reflection on the issues raised in class over the semester
     • good formal organisation , appropriate for an academic paper
     • appropriate use of citations and references
     • ability to situate your analysis/results within a framework of previous work
     • good support (in terms of theory and/or data) for arguments presented
     • clearly stated perspective and coherent structure    

I'll describe a linguistic and applied linguistic  approach to the assignment. A linguistics paper would be based on some aspect of language (grammar, lexis, metaphor, discourse, etc.) which is described/analysed using the insights gained from a corpus and which is presented within a framework of previous approaches to the topic. An applied linguistics paper will typically focus on one aspect of corpora and language learning. Example: the treatment of a lexical/grammatical topic typically found within a pedagogical grammar (one or more language teaching textbooks) which is contrasted with corpus-based analysis of the relevant phenomena. You will then reflect on the pedagogical consequences of your findings, which may involve a consideration of the use of corpus-based materials. Example: an assessment of the theory and practice of using corpus-based materials in the classroom.

Most papers will be some variant of one of these themes, but let me add a couple of other options. One is to add a contrastive component, which could involve analyses of two languages, or the analysis of different genres/text types within a single language, or a contrast of spoken and written language. A second option is to analyse learner language, that is, to look at a corpus of the output of the writings of learners.

When you have an idea of what you want to work on, you should produce a brief outline and send me email to set up an appointment to talk about your paper.

Due: June 14