1st Edition

Corpus Linguistics for Education A Guide for Research

By Pascual Pérez-Paredes Copyright 2020
    194 Pages 42 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    194 Pages 42 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    List of figures

    List of tables

    Preface

    Acknowledgements

    Chapter 1: Introduction: corpus linguistics and education research

    1.1 What is corpus linguistics?

    1.2 The role of corpus linguistics research methods in education research

    1.3 Understanding the role of frequency

    1.3.1 Frequency in L1 learning and use

    1.3.2 Frequency in public discourse

    1.3.3 Frequency in texts or groups of texts

    1.3.4 Skill 1: Why frequency matters

    1.3.5 How to interpret frequency

    References

    Chapter 2: Analysing text

    2.1 Different approaches to text analysis

    2.2 Text as register

    2.2.1 Corpus linguistics and the analysis of register

    References

    Chapter 3: Corpus linguistics approaches to understanding language use

    3.1 Understanding and researching language use: discovering patterns

    3.1.1 Corpus linguistics outside linguistics?

    3.1.2 Case study 1. Examining interviews: qualitative versus CL methods

    3.1.3 Case study 2. Examining policies: combining content analysis and corpus methods

    3.1.4 Using an existing corpus

    3.2 Reading concordance lines

    3.2.1 How to read concordance lines?

    3.3 Handling frequencies

    3.3.1 Corpus size and relative frequencies

    3.4 Collocations

    References

    Chapter 4: Researching education policies: using your own corpus

    4.1 Basic corpus design features

    4.1.1 Designing corpora

    4.2 Comparison basics and significance testing

    4.2.1 Comparison basics and part of speech (POS) tagging

    4.3 Reviewing skills 1-11

    4.3.1 Chapter 1

    4.3.2 Chapter 2

    4.3.3 Chapter 3

    4.3.4 Chapter 4

    References

    Chapter 5: Interview data: transcription and annotation

    5.1 Transcription: so much more than a monotonous task

    5.2 Transcription basics

    5.3 Adding structure and metadata to a corpus

    5.3.1 Annotating a corpus using our own tags

    5.3.2 Annotating a corpus using standard XML guidelines

    References

    Chapter 6: Examining lexis. analysing peace treaties and children´s literature

    6.1 Examining lexis

    6.2 Researching the lexicon: keywords

    6.2.1 Introducing keyword analysis

    6.2.2 Keyword analysis: a step-by-step guide

    6.3 Researching nouns and noun phrases

    6.3.1 Exploring individual nouns

    6.3.2 Exploring multiword units

    6.4 Analysing children´s literature: the lexicon of fiction

    References

    Chapter 7: Analysing talk: complex searches

    7.1 Examining talk: a linguistic perspective

    7.2 Complex searches

    7.2.1 Living in a city

    7.2.2 Understanding cultural differences

    7.2.3 How is their family life impacted by work?

    7.3 Putting all together: reviewing skills 12-17

    7.3.1 Chapter 5

    7.3.2 Chapter 6

    7.3.3 Chapter 7

    References

    Chapter 8: Conclusion

    References

    Index

    Biography

    Pascual Pérez-Paredes is Professor in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the English Department, Universidad de Murcia, Spain. At the time of writing this book he was Lecturer in Research in Second Language Education (2015–19) and Overall Coordinator of the MEd Research Methods Strand (2016–19) at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK. His main research interests are learner language variation, the use of corpora in language education and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. He has published research in journals such as Computer Assisted Language Learning , Discourse & Society, English for Specific Purposes, Journal of Pragmatics, Language, Learning & Technology, System, ReCALL and the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, and is an Assistant Editor of CUP ReCALL journal.