While there is widespread agreement on the expected benefits of hands-on access to corpora for language learners, reports abound of the difficulties involved in realising those benefits in practice. A particular focus of discussion is the challenge of transferring the skills of the corpus linguist to learners, so that they can explore this type of…

Lexical competence is considered as an important indicator of language proficiency. While learning vocabulary, learners need to remember various aspects of knowledge about the word (e.g., meaning, form and use). Many vocabulary learning strategies have been proposed to help learners consolidate vocabulary knowledge. Among them, grouping words…

Although data collection has been used in language learning settings for some time, it is only in recent decades that large corpora have become available, along with efficient tools for their use. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled rich tagging and annotation of corpus data, essential for their effective use in language…

This article reports on a language learning system and a program designed to help students with academic vocabulary in the New Zealand university computer science department. The system is a learner-friendly corpus-based tool that allows students to look up lexico-grammatical patterns of a given word in academic writing. The program, based on a…

Formulaic language is important to language acquisition; however, English language learners are often reported to have problems with formulaic expressions. Several lists of formulaic sequences have been proposed, mainly for developing teaching and testing materials. However, their limited numbers and insufficient usage information seem unable to…

While studies exploring the overall effectiveness of Data Driven Learning activities have been positive, learner participants often seem to report difficulties in deciding what to look up, and how to formulate appropriate queries for a search (Gabel, 2001; Sun, 2003; Yeh, Liou, & Li, 2007). "The Prime Machine" (Jeaco, 2015) was…

The present paper shows the first results of a linguistic project devoted to the construction of web learning tools for reinforcing sensitivity to diaphasic varieties and for learning style variation in L2/LS learning. (Contains 1 figure and 1 footnote.) [Support for this research was provided by the VALERE Project.]

In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners' interactions is a…

This paper describes the first prototype of an automated tool for detecting collocation errors in texts written by non-native speakers of English. Candidate strings are extracted by pattern matching over POS-tagged text. Since learner texts often contain spelling and morphological errors, the tool attempts to automatically correct them in order to…

Describes the language learning program "Acquire," which is a sample of grammar induction. It is a learning algorithm based on a pattern-matching scheme, using both a positive and negative network to reduce overgeneration. Language learning programs may be useful as tutorials for learning the syntax of a foreign language. (Author/LMO)

The ability of the computer to generate output not included in the input may be used for linguistic as well as for computational input. The ability to accept linguistic data and process it according to a certain program seems to be a promising field for investigation. Progress in this field may strengthen the assumption that the computer can be…

Papers from the linguistics colloquium address a variety of topics in linguistic theory and language research, most in French. Topics include: objectivity and subjectivity in understanding language; focalization in conversational language; the notion of "popular etymology"; serial construction in Malagasy; linguistic competence (in German);…

Instead of being completely arbitrary, the meaning of many idioms is "motivated" by their original, literal usage. In an FLT context, this offers the possibility of presenting idioms in ways that promote insightful learning rather than "blind" memorization. Associating an idiom with its etymology has been shown to enhance retention. This effect…

A study found that, when temporal characteristics of stops in a Spanish utterance by a native English-speaker were computer-manipulated, native Spanish-speakers' perceptions of the foreignness of the speech were affected. Results imply that Spanish language instruction should include instruction to shorten stops to more Spanish-like values,…

Papers from a British conference on applied linguistics address various aspects of evaluation and language. Articles include: "Grammar and Language Impairment: Clinical Linguistics as Applied Linguistics" (Paul Fletcher); "Putting Our Practice Into Theory" (Deborah Cameron); "Applied Linguistics as Evaluation of Theory and…