Author Archives: langcorp

The International Conference for Learner Corpus Research – LCR 2022 University of Padua

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

The International Conference for Learner Corpus Research (LCR 2022) will be held at the University of Padua (Italy), at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies (www.disll.unipd.it) on 22-24 September, 2022.

The LCR2022 Conference aims to showcase the latest developments in the field of learner corpus research regarding the description of learner language and the design of innovative methods and tools to analyse it. 

The conference will feature keynote lectures, full paper presentations, work in progress reports, poster presentations, software demonstrations and a book exhibition. Pre-conference workshops are also planned. 

Keynote speakers

–          Silvia Bernardini (Università di Bologna, Italy)

–          Anke Lüdeling (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)

–          Hilary Nesi (Coventry University, England)

Submissions

All topics related to learner corpus research based on any language are welcome. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: 

  • Language for Academic Purposes; 
  • Language for Specific Purposes;
  • Language Teaching, Assessment and Testing;
  • Learner corpus-based SLA studies;
  • Corpora as pedagogical resources;
  • Multimodal learner corpora;
  • Software for learner corpus analysis;
  • Corpus-based translation studies;
  • English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI);
  • English as a Lingua Franca (ELF);
  • Data mining and other explorative approaches to learner corpora;
  • Statistical methods in learner corpus studies.

Abstracts

Abstracts, written in English, should be between 600 and 700 words (excluding a list of references) and should provide the following:

–          clearly articulated research question(s) and its/their relevance;

–          the most important details about research approach, data and methods;

–          (preliminary) results and their interpretation.

Abstracts will be submitted through EasyChair. Abstract submission will open on 18 November 2021 and the deadline for submission is 23 January 2022. Abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by the scientific committee. Notification of the outcome of the review process will be sent by 31 March 2022.

Further information is available at www.maldura.unipd.it/lcr-2022/

39 Congreso de la Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada (AESLA2022)

AESLA 2022 : Intercultural perspectives on language varieties / Las variedades lingüísticas desde el enfoque intercultural

https://aesla2022.ulpgc.es/

Texto distribuido en la lista de correo de AESLA

El congreso se celebrará los días 27 a 29 de abril de 2022 en la Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Las conferencias plenarias estarán a cargo de Silvia Betti (Universidad de Bolonia), Marina Bondi (Universidad de Módena), María del Pilar García Mayo (Universidad del País Vasco) y de Istvan Kesckes (Universidad de Nueva York).

Como novedad en esta edición, existe un panel específico para estudiantes pre-doctorales que contará con una breve introducción sobre formatos de publicación científica.

The Graduate Student Conference in Learner Corpus Research 2021

A virtual conference, under the aegis of the  Learner Corpus Association at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences (INN)

Program here.

Event URL. https://eng.inn.no/conferences/the-graduate-student-conference-in-learner-corpus-research-2021

This event offers a great opportunity for MA and PhD students to present their (in-progress) results, share ideas, receive feedback from senior researchers in the field, and further develop their professional networks. Senior researchers are welcome as delegates, helping to ensure the high quality of the event and foster the careers of Early Career Researchers.

The Learner Corpus Association (LCA) is an international association which aims to promote the field of learner corpus research and provide an interdisciplinary forum for all the researchers and professionals who are actively involved in the field or simply want to know more about it. 

LCA supports the compilation of learner corpora (i.e. electronic collections of written and/or spoken language produced by foreign/second language learners) in a wide range of languages and the design of innovative methods and tools to analyze them. It seeks to link up learner corpus research to second language acquisition theory, first language acquisition theory and linguistic theory in general and to promote applications in fields including foreign language teaching, language testing and natural language processing (automated scoring, spell- and grammar-checking, L1 identification).

Video: Corpus Linguistics and the Analysis of L2 Spoken and Written Texts, 26 October 2021

–Corpus Linguistics and the Analysis of L2 Spoken and Written Texts
Dr Kris Kyle, University of Oregon
26 October, 19:00 (Madrid-Paris-Brussels-Berlin time) Zoom registration link

Productive lexical proficiency has been an important topic in applied linguistics for over 25 years (e.g., Crossley et al., 2011; Kyle & Crossley, 2015; Laufer & Nation, 1995). During this time, word frequency measures have played a dominant role (Laufer & Nation, 1995). While word frequency is undoubtedly important, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that lexical proficiency is most accurately modeled when multiple lexical and lexicogrammatical features are used (e.g., Kim et al., 2018; Kyle et al., 2018;). In this talk, an overview of selected measures of lexical proficiency at the word (e.g., concreteness, contextual diversity, lexical access, etc.) and lexicogrammatical (i.e., n-gram, dependency relations and verb-verb argument construction strength of association) level is provided. The use of these features is then highlighted in two learner corpus research studies.

Kristopher Kyle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. His research interests include second language acquisition, second language writing, and second language assessment. He is addresses these topics using corpus linguistic methods through the adaptation and development of natural language processing tools.

Coordination: Prof Pascual Pérez-Paredes

This event is sponsored by the Facultad de Letras, Universidad de Murcia, and the English Department, Universidad de Murcia.

Video: Corpus linguistics and the analysis of language ideology, 20 October 2021

–Corpus linguistics and the analysis of language ideology
Dr. Rachelle Vessey, Carleton University, Canada
20 October, 19:00 (Madrid-Paris-Brussels-Berlin time) Zoom registration link

In this presentation, I will introduce the notion of ‘language ideology’ and how it can be studied using corpus linguistics. Although the notion of ‘ideology’ is widely associated with discourse and is analyzed in various discourse analytic approaches (including corpus-assisted discourse approaches), the concept of language ideology is more specific and has been less frequently tackled using corpus linguistic methods. In this paper, I show how corpus linguistic methods can help identify and examine language ideologies in both their implicit and explicit manifestations. Moreover, I argue that language ideology provides a critical reflexive lens, enabling corpus linguists to (re)consider the nature of the data they examine. To highlight the opportunities and challenges, I draw on examples from research on the United Nations, newspaper articles, and Twitter.

Rachelle Vessey is an Assistant Professor in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University (Canada). Her research centres on language ideologies and how these manifest in discourse.  She is particularly interested in how beliefs about language contribute to social inclusion and exclusion. She has examined language ideologies in large corpora of (English and French) Canadian newspapers, online forums, interviews with domestic workers, United Nations official documents and extremist magazines.

Coordination: Prof Pascual Pérez-Paredes

This event is sponsored by the Facultad de Letras, Universidad de Murcia, and the English Department, Universidad de Murcia.

EU citizens in the UK. Elena Remigi speaks at the Advice to Justice Conference in Liverpool

Elena Remigi (InLimbo) speaks at the Advice to Justice Conference in Liverpool (7th September 2021).

Check out our presentation “Where´s home? EU citizens as migrants” at Approaches to migration, language and identity 2020 AMLI Conference (www) University of Sussex, Wednesday 9 – Friday 11 June 2021


Pascual Pérez-Paredes & Elena Remigi
Universidad de Murcia / The In Limbo Project

Abstract

Since January 2021, UK and EU citizens can no longer exercise freedom of movement between the two areas. EU, EEA or Swiss citizens living in the UK before 31 December 2020 have been forced to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme to continue living in the UK. In practical terms, EU citizens have become a new migrant community. The 2016 Brexit referendum started a period of uncertainty, agony and frustration for both EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU that ended with the trade deal that the EU and the UK made public on 24 December 2020. The anger, the sense of betrayal (Bueltmann, 2020) and various mental health issues (Reimer, 2018; Bueltmann, 2020), however, linger on. This study uses a corpus of 200 testimonies from EU citizens in the UK to explore their feelings and reactions to Brexit and the hostile environment (Leudar et al., 2008) that emerged soon after the referendum. The In Limbo corpus of testimonies contains personal accounts by EU citizens living in Britain from 2017 until 2020. It has 81,000 tokens and 7,600 types. The collection of the data was organised by volunteers on a not-for-profit basis. The testimonies in Remigi, E., Martin, V., & Sykes (2020) were chosen as the basis of our corpus.


We used keyword (Baker, 2006; Baker et al., 2008) and collocation (Baker, 2006; Pérez-Paredes, Aguado & Sánchez, 2017; Pérez-Paredes, 2020) analyses to explore the self-representation of EU citizens across four emerging areas of interest: family life, loss of identity, feeling unwelcome and representations of post-Brexit Britain, including discourses about settled status and Britishness. In order to moderate the impact of Brexit-as-a-topic in the analysis of the narratives, we used two reference corpora in our study: the Brexit corpus and the enTenTen 2015, both provided through Sketch Engine. We used Wodak’s (2001) framework of analysis of representation strategies to pin down our discussion of the discourses emerging in the testimonies. Two strategies appear to be relevant in the context of our data: predication and perspectivation. The former is used mainly when expressing feelings about the UK while the latter are crucial to deliver the narratives discursively. While our research confirms some of the conclusions in the survey conducted by Bueltmann (2020), the combination of corpus-based CDA methods and the rich data provided through these narratives open up further understanding of the discursive strategies used by EU citizens when resisting the anti-EU environment that was unleashed in the wake of Brexit. Our analysis provides an alternative representation of the consequences and impact of Brexit on EU migrants that is in contrast with the recent triumphalist discourse of the Tory government that misrepresents EU citizens as happily embracing the settled status scheme.

Keywords: Brexit, EU citizens, migrants, keyword analysis, representation strategies