[Corpora-List] The methodology used by "language learners as researchers"

From: Mark Davies (mdavies@ilstu.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 22 2002 - 10:28:00 MET DST

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    I'm looking for articles dealing with the topic "The Language Learner as
    Researcher". I'm aware of the large body of research and publications
    dealing with the topic of using corpora to teach the L2 to learners, such as
    those listed at http://lingo.lancs.ac.uk/devotedto/corpora/misc.htm. What
    I'm looking for, however, is something a bit more narrow:

    -- The language learners are advanced students
    -- The language learners carry out their own research on topics of interest,
    rather than in-class activities designed by the professor
    -- The research deals (preferably) with advanced issues in syntax, rather
    than basic collocational patterns, etc.
    -- (If possible) The research is based on large corpora, such as the BNC,
    BoE, Corpus del Espaņol, CREA, etc.

    A concrete example of what I'm talking about is the "Variation in Spanish
    Syntax" class that I'm offering right now on the web
    (http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/sintaxis). In this class, advanced students
    (many of them high school teachers) use several corpora of Spanish and
    search tools like Google to carry out their own research on a wide range of
    topics relating to syntactic variation in Spanish.

    I'm particularly interested in the **methodology** that L2 learners use in
    carrying out their research -- i.e. how they learn to carry out searches on
    the corpora, how they make hypotheses about the data in question, how they
    test these hypotheses, etc. The basic issue, of course, is that of getting
    students to shift from language _learner_ to language _researcher_, and to
    follow the correct methodology in order to make valid claims about the L2.

    So what I'm looking for are courses (or parts of courses) that are roughly
    comparable to what I'm teaching right now. I'm aware of the work by Claire
    Kennedy & Tiziana Miceli of Griffith University and am also aware of the
    contents of the most recent three TALC conferences. But starting points for
    research from any other venues would be most appreciated.

    Thanks,

    Mark Davies

    =======================================
    Mark Davies, Associate Professor, Spanish Linguistics
    http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/
    4300 Foreign Languages / Illinois State University
    Normal, IL 61790-4300
    309-438-7975 (voice) / 309-438-8038 (fax)
    =======================================

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