Much of the research into language learners' use of corpus resources has been conducted by means of indirect observation methodologies, like questionnaires or self-reports. While this type of study provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on the benefits and limitations of using corpora to teach and learn language, the use of indirect observation methodologies may confine the scope of research to learners' opinions about the benefits of using corpora for language learning and their self-perceived difficulties in consulting them. This article proposes and discusses the use of logs to research learners' actual use of corpus-based resources, analyzing the number of events or actions performed by each individual, the total number of different web services used, the number of activities completed, the number of searches performed on the British National Corpus (BNC) and, last, the number of words or wildcards per BNC search. Our research used these parameters to investigate whether learner interaction with corpus-based resources differed under different corpus consultation conditions: guided versus non-guided consultation. Our findings show that the individuals in the two research conditions behaved differently in two of the parameters analyzed: the number of different web services used during the completion of the tasks and the number of BNC searches. Our results corroborate empirically the suggestions found in the literature that skills and guidance are necessary when teachers take a corpus to the classroom. Similarly, we offer evidence that user tracking is essential to claim research and results validity.
Abstract Our research examines the use of three stance adverbs of certainty ( actually, really and obviously ) across B1, B2 and C1 levels in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus (TLC). Particularly, we examined the occurrence of these adverbs in the subset of Spanish L1 speakers from Mexico and Spain. Really, actually and obviously were found to display a distinctive frequency of use across different proficiency levels and the different speaking tasks analysed. Dialogic tasks favoured a more frequent use of really and actually , while obviously was hardly used. Qualitative analyses of the pragmatic functions of really and actually revealed that there is an increase in the use of meanings to express hedging in really and factualness in actually across the proficiency levels. Our research confirms the finding in Gablasova et al. (2017) that the type of speaking task conditions speakers’ repertoire of linguistic devices, although we argue that this conditioning operates on different levels.
Corpus Linguistics for Education provides a practical and comprehensive introduction to the use of corpus research-methods in the field of education. Taking a hands-on approach to showcase the applications of corpora in the exploration of educationally relevant topics, this book: • covers 18 key skills including corpus building, the role of frequency, different corpus methods, transcription and annotation; • demonstrates the use of available corpora and desktop and online corpus analysis tools to conduct original analyses; • features case studies and step-by-step guides within each chapter; • emphasises the use of interview data in research projects. Corpus Linguistics for Education is an essential guide for students and researchers studying or conducting their own corpus-based research in education.