Babylonia Multilingual Journal of Language Education

Learner corpora and blossoming buds

Editorial Team of Babylonia — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

prìmula (non com. prìmola) s. f. [lat. scient. Primula, dal lat. mediev. primula, der. di primus «primo»]. – Genere di piante primulacee con alcune centinaia di specie erbacee quasi tutte perenni, in prevalenza delle zone montane e subalpine dell’emisfero settentrionale

Following the issue on linguistic variation in the language classroom, Babylonia now turns its attention to the diversity of learner production. After ogling the beautiful city meadows on a Sunday stroll, we invite you to shadow the botanist working hard to classify, study and preserve traces of the first linguistic blossoms.

Though autumn is now beginning, we'd like to remind you of one of the first spring flowers: the primrose. This vibrantly colored plant symbolizes renewal and growth, but it is also particularly vulnerable: drought, fluctuating temperatures, and the richness of the soil can all impair its growth.

Babylonia's editorial team has launched a new section, Primula, to advance and support the next generation of teachers/researchers by showcasing university student thesis work. You'll find our first “primrose” in this issue.

Happy reading!

PRIMULA: Graded readers in the EFL classroom – the example of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Janina Liechti — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Graded readers allow pupils in an EFL classroom to engage with literary texts which would usually be too difficult for them. Yet at what price does this engagement come? The linguistic analysis which was performed to compare different graded readers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the original revealed major simplifications on the lexical and syntactic levels. This has an impact on the meaning of this fascinating literary text. Amongst other things, the characters’ emotions are less distinctly represented in the graded readers. Aiming to recover this loss in literary meaning, a classroom project following the principles of task-based language teaching was developed.

Learner corpora to cater for learners’ individual needs

Gaëtanelle Gilquin — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Learner corpora, like other corpora, have mostly been used to generalize about whole populations. Yet, they can be exploited for teaching purposes in a more differentiated and inclusive manner, by showing how learners with a specific profile use (or are likely to use) the target language. Such an approach can rely on the metadata found in existing learner corpora or on corpus data collected among one’s own students. Findings based on the analysis of these corpora can help develop tailor-made pedagogical materials and activities to meet learners’ individual needs, including data-driven learning activities through which students make discoveries about their own target language use.

Learner corpora in foreign language education: examples from the multilingual SWIKO corpus

Nina Hicks, Thomas Studer — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This contribution introduces the Swiss learner corpus SWIKO and provides examples on how this rich and near-authentic collection can be utilized in foreign language education, while also addressing some critical issues that corpus linguistic applications face in pedagogical contexts. SWIKO is a multilingual corpus currently being developed at the Institute of Multilingualism in Fribourg. The corpus contains written and spoken productions by Swiss lower secondary school students, both in their language of schooling and foreign languages learnt at school (English, French, and German). Participating students completed eight communicative tasks which systematically vary by rhetorical type (descriptive or argumentative), topic (personal or academic), and structure (more or less restrictive input). The resulting productions were analysed with a focus on linguistic features (e.g., Karges et al., 2022) and in relation to human ratings according to the levels of the CEFR (e.g., Studer & Hicks, 2022). Based on our findings, we present two scenarios on how SWIKO can be used in educational settings, i.e., teacher training and material development. First, the productions can serve as an illustration of learners’ abilities at the end of mandatory schooling. Our findings show how the length, complexity, and accuracy of learner texts heavily depend on the task, which can be addressed in teacher training. Second, an analysis of frequent errors in foreign language productions can shed light on challenging structures, while the language of schooling sub-corpus can serve as a peer-reference in the development of corresponding material. We exemplify this process focusing on negation in German, offering differentiated teaching material suitable for the secondary school classroom.

„und dann isses aber trotzdem manchmal anders wie man spricht“ – Verschmelzungsformen in der gesprochenen Wissenschaftssprache von Studierenden mit Deutsch als L1 und L2

Matthias Schwendemann, Franziska Wallner — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

The article discusses the use and frequency of spoken language clitics in academic lectures among 121 students who speak German as their first language (L1) (n=25) or as a second or foreign language (L2) (n=96). The study reveals that students use a variety of clitics, and there are noticeable differences between students with German as L1 and L2, as well as between different academic contexts and data collection locations. The study's results also highlight the need for improvements in teaching German as an academic language, including those outlined in this text.

Générer des principes didactiques à partir de données de corpus

Gwendoline Lovey — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

La linguistique de corpus peut-elle aussi être utilisée pour analyser l’impact de certaines interventions didactiques ? La réponse est «oui» comme le montre la recherche sur les interactions orales entre élèves et sur les introductions aux activités de production orale par différentes enseignant-e-s. L’analyse du corpus débouche, entre autres, sur un programme didactique en cinq étapes qui permet d’optimiser les productions orales des élèves notamment par une amélioration de l’input de l’enseignant-e. La recherche a en effet permis de démontrer que la manière dont un-e enseignant-e introduit une activité d’interaction orale influence considérablement sa réalisation par les élèves.

« Je ne sais pas », « Je n’sais pas », « Ch’sais pas », « Chais pas » … Quelle place pour la variation phonique dans l’enseignement/apprentissage du français langue étrangère ?

Isabelle Racine — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Si les spécialistes préconisent depuis longtemps l’enseignement d’un français basé sur les usages authentiques, la place de la variation dans l’enseignement du français langue étrangère reste encore un défi. Pour les apprenant-es, il en résulte des difficultés tant sur le plan de la perception que de la production. Dans cette contribution, nous les illustrons à travers l’appropriation de la forme « je ne sais pas » et montrons en quoi les données issues des projets « Phonologie du Français Contemporain » (PFC) et « InterPhonologie du Français Contemporain » (IPFC) fournissent un apport intéressant pour mieux comprendre la manière dont les natifs/ves appréhendent la variation phonique à l’oral (données PFC) mais aussi celle dont les apprenant-es s’approprient ces phénomènes (données IPFC).

Corpora as input and output: the example of the French discourse markers 'bon' and 'bien'

Anita Thomas, France Rousset — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This article presents some of the results of the DiCoi project, which aims to create didactic material from oral corpora of French and to study the development of the interaction competence of learners of L2 French in vocational training for manual trades. We describe the main lines of a didactic intervention on the discourse markers bon and bien and then the production of these markers in the longitudinal (two years) corpus DiCoi, including free interactions between peers. The results show that the use of bien is more productive than that of bon, as well as an increase in the frequency and diversity of the functions of the two markers among learners. The discussion returns to the use of corpora as input and output.

‘Frapper’ ou ‘jeter sur’, comment choisir ? Apport de l’analyse de corpus expérimentaux

Mireille Copin, Inès Saddour — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Teachers and researchers have shown the heterogeneity of the lexical competence. Recent studies have highlighted didactic proposals involving explicit learning around a single thematic domain, based on linguistic models, notably referring to movement verbs (Garcia-Debanc & Aurnague 2020). We offer a corpus method to study the distribution of verbs of another thematic domain -- namely collision -- and to study the semantic acquisition of L2 verbs. This study opens potentially new ways to study and teach vocabulary in an additional language.

This study involves two corpora in French L1 and L2 of causal chains like "X does an action with an object which touches Y" in which we analyze verbs expressing contact. Our corpora contain oral descriptions of 16 video clips told by 22 French L1 speakers, that we compare to oral descriptions in French L2 told by 29 speakers of Syrian Arabic L1. In our videos, the object used as well as the distance between the two protagonists varies. Like Majid et al. (2008), we did cluster analyses of the verbs to determine whether they shared the same meaning for the two groups.

These analyses first show that the choice of a certain verb depends on the distance, especially in French L1. Qualitative analyses reveal that learners tend to prefer and over-use certain contact verbs (i.e. frapper/ hit) in every situation, including cases in which verbs expressing caused motion of the objet are preferred in French L1 (i.e. jeter sur/ throw on). These results show that the acquisition of verbs meaning in an additional language is a complex process, and that the use of a verbal form does not imply the acquisition of its meaning in context. We draw from this observation to propose didactic perspectives, relying on the observation and meta-linguistic analysis of oral and video corpora in French L1 by learners, involving for instance verb classification activities.

Un corpus de productions écrites françaises – matériau pour mieux comprendre les choix lexicaux d’apprenants multilingues

Christina Lindqvist — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

The aim of the present paper is to present a corpus containing 105 Swedish learners’ written production in French and to discuss some possible didactic applications of such a corpus. Learners from four different grades (age 11-15) were invited to retell a short picture story in writing. One of the main characteristics of the corpus is that it is multilingual in nature, with many instances of influences from the learners’ previously acquired languages. It is argued that this type of corpus can be useful in class, allowing for potential learning situations, linguistic development and metalinguistic reflection.

Teaching and learning foreign languages

Rosamond Mitchell, Florence Myles — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

A classroom corpus is a set of audio- or videorecordings of authentic L2 lessons, which have been transcribed and prepared for analysis. Such a corpus provides direct insight into how the L2 curriculum is delivered and experienced in the classroom in real time.

In this contribution we first present some examples of past research using classroom corpora, emphasising the variety of perspectives which can motivate such research. We then describe the ‘Learning French’ corpus of lessons taught to young Anglophone beginners, and the insights concerning input, engagement and L2 learning deriving from different analyses of this corpus. In conclusion we discuss the potential contributions of classroom corpus research to our understanding of pedagogy and the improvement of practice.

Das Projekt DAKODA - Interview

Matthias Schwendemann, Katrin Wisniewski — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

DAKODA – Datenkompetenzen für DaF/DaZDAKODA ist ein interdisziplinäres Projekt mit dem übergeordneten Ziel, die Datenkompetenzen des wissenschaftlichen DaF/DaZ-Nachwuchses im Bereich Lernerkorpusforschung voranzutreiben. Im Projekt werden sprachtechnolo-gische Ressourcen für erwerbsbezogene Fragestellungen entwickelt und auf Basis einer breiten Datengrundlage erprobt. DAKODA soll somit Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Anwendung computerlinguistischer Verfahren für Lerner-sprachenanalysen explorativ ausloten. Dazu kooperiert das Projektteam am Herder-Institut der Universität Leipzig (Leitung: Prof. Dr. Katrin Wisniewski) mit dem Language Technology Lab der FernUniversität in Hagen (Leitung: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Torsten Zesch).Das Projekt wird von 10.2022 – 9.2025 in der Förderline «Datenkompetenzen des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs» vom BMBF gefördert (https://www.bil-dung-forschung.digital/digitalezukunft/de/wissen/Datenkompetenzen/daten-kompetenzen_wissenschaftlichen_nachwuchs/datenkompetenzen_wiss_na-chwuchs.html).

Learner corpora in foreign languages

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Babylonia vous offre une plongée dans l’interlangue avec un numéro sur les corpus d’apprenant-es. Ces recueils de productions écrites ou orales nous renseignent certes sur la progression des élèves, mais mettent aussi en évidence les pratiques enseignantes efficaces, l’influence du contexte d’apprentissage, et même un nouveau rapport à la « norme ».

Gilquin nous montre comment utiliser les corpus pour développer du matériel didactique ou différencier ses enseignements. Schwendemann & Wisnieski erläutern in einem Interview die Herausforderungen, die zu bewältigen sind, um eine Vielfalt von Lernerkorpora in einem Repositorium zu integrieren und verfügbar zu machen. Hicks & Studer unveil correlations between the type of task and the quality of students’ productions in a multilingual corpus and present a Data-Driven-Learning activity to teach negation in German. Schwendemann & Wallner untersuchen Verschmelzungsformen in der gesprochenen Wissenschaftssprache von Studierenden mit Deutsch als L1 und L2. Avec des corpus d’enregistrements de leçons, or « classroom corpus », Lovey analyse les productions d’élèves en fonction des gestes enseignants qui accompagnent les activités, while Mitchell & Myles warrant us insights concerning input, engagement and L2 learning. Racine se penche tant sur la réception que sur la production de caractéristiques phonologiques du français oral par les apprenant-es allophones. Thomas & Rousset étudient l’apprentissage, réceptif et productif, de marqueurs discursifs en français et discutent une intervention didactique qui engage les apprenant-es à observer des usages spontanés en L1. Pour mieux comprendre les choix lexicaux d’apprenant-es de français, Copin & Saddour utilisent un corpus de type expérimental et une grille d’analyse issue de la sémantique cognitive tandis que Linqvist analyse des productions écrites d’élèves mutlitilingues.
Last but not least, don't miss our first Primula by Janina Liechti!

Viel Spass beim Lesen!

Corpus d’apprenant-es : un « basquette » de ressources pour l’enseignement des langues étrangères

Karine Lichtenauer, Anita Thomas — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Viel Spass beim Lesen!